Tidbits from Brian - Issue #36

The importance of taking time to recharge. 🔋

Sep 27, 2024

Earlier this month, I took a vacation with my family for the first time in over two years. It reminded me of just how important it is to take time to recharge my batteries, even if that means my step count for the month increased by 249%. 🚶‍♂️😅

We kept pretty busy, but I very much needed a mental break from my daily routine of tickets, troubleshooting, documentation, and development. Sometimes, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut without even knowing it. The saying “go touch grass” also comes to mind.

I’m thankful for the time I got to spend with my family, and not going to let it go this long again without taking a break. Also, being an Uncle is the best! 😄

Updates ✍️

Even with vacation, we managed to push out an exciting update for our Novashare plugin this month. Here are a few of the changes:

*Optimized* share button functionality to open in a new browser tab instead of popup. This allows us to completely remove the frontend JS file. One less request and 1.2 KB smaller. 🔥 Pinterest-specific JS to manage image grid will now be printed inline only when needed.
*Optimized* plugin logo and inline SVG network icons. Icon sizes decreased on average by 5%! ⚡
*New* share and follow button support for Bluesky network.
Fixed an issue where the license tab was showing up at the subsite level if the plugin was not network activated in multisite.
Fixed an issue where X share button was not handing off to the native app when on a mobile device. 📲
Fixed an issue where a blank tab would sometimes be left behind in the browser on mobile when handing off to a native app.
Removed deprecated API calls for TwitCount and OpenShareCount.
Updated Grow references to Hubbub in the Novashare migrator. 🚚

In case you missed them, we just finished our fifth and final video in the Vitality series with Kyle from The Admin Bar. In all, we covered Time to First Byte (TTFB), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Contentful Paint (FCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Total Blocking Time (TBT). ⚡ Presentation slides are included in the video descriptions. These were a lot of work, so I hope they were helpful.

And if you aren’t a Perfmatters customer yet, we partnered up with EWWW for a birthday giveaway. Enter now for your chance to win an EWWW IO license or a full year of Perfmatters. 🎁

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is now integrated into Google Search. However, with this change, the previous cache feature is now dead.
US online passport renewal is now fully open for business. This will be handy!
United Airlines is installing Starlink on their planes. Honestly, it will be really cool when this is just the new standard everywhere.
Speaking of internet, it’s crazy that I live in the 10th largest metropolitan area in the US and still only have one ISP available. And because of this, they have ridiculous data cap overage charges.
iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia were released this month! I already took the plunge. Here are a few of my personal thoughts:
- iPhone mirroring is awesome. Great for developers to test things.
- The calculator is too small now.
- The integrated window management works really well.
- The Notes highlight feature is very handy.

WordPress

Most of you probably already know about the drama happening this week between Automattic and WP Engine. It was hard to miss. If not, I recommend you catch up with Eric Karkovack’s timeline of events or Brian Coord’s post. I actually agree with a lot of what Brian said.
- In my opinion, the whole situation is just downright embarrassing and could have been handled so much better.
- The folks suffering now are the hardworking WordPress users and businesses hosted at WP Engine that had nothing to do with this mess.
- On a funny note. We had never run ads before and decided to give it a try due to some free credits. Whoever took the screenshots at Automattic included our ad in their cease-and-desist letter. As Clive on X said, our Perfmatters ad is now cemented in history. 😅 The one time we run ads. 🤦

Our plugin ad in Automattic cease-and-desist letter

Automattic is migrating Tumblr to WordPress, a move described as “one of the largest technical migrations in internet history.” Would love to see case study on this.
WPLift was acquired by E2M Solutions. Manish Dudharejia, the CEO of E2M, says WPLift isn’t going away and it will help them expand their reach.
Elementor has launched the Site Mailer plugin for those needing to send transactional emails.

Performance

Cloudflare released a lot of amazing new features this week! Here’s a quick summary:
- They rolled out Speed Brain, 🧠 which is essentially deploying the Speculation Rules API. They are only doing prefetch at the moment, but the good news is that prerender is coming. But for the time being, I’ve disabled the feature on my Cloudflare sites and am using prerender in the Speculative Loading plugin. I’ll probably offload this to Cloudflare once they add prerender.
  - Be careful when turning this on or off, as they try to enable RUM on your site. If you don’t need the analytics, I recommend keeping RUM off for now.
- Stand aside GZIP and Brotli, Zstandard compression is in the house. It looks like it might be a really good middle ground in terms of compression ratio and speed. ⚡
- Cloudflare has upgraded its servers, which they claim are 145% more performant and 63% more efficient.
- They’ve drastically reduced the time to invalidate cache when purging. It’s now under 150 ms. 🔥
- Workers KV are up to 3x faster. This includes improvements for things like tiered cache.
If our Perfmatters plugin has ever helped you, we would love a vote in the Monster's Award 2024.
Paul Calvano has released a new tool called Third Party Explorer. It allows you to more easily analyze the data from WebPageTest. Pretty cool!
As of September 24th, fetch priority is now supported by all three major browsers. This is a big win. ⚡
The new Performance panel updates in Chrome DevTools are awesome.
AVIF, WebP Converter is a new free WordPress image optimization plugin on the block. It might be worth checking out.
Chrome officially ends support for First Input Delay (FID). This was replaced by INP.
Elementor keeps pushing out performance updates, which is exciting to see! I commend them for spending a lot of time on this over the past year.
PerfLab is a new tool that allows you to more easily digest and understand Chrome trace data. Backstory in this thread.

Marketing

Fathom released an update so that event completions now use the first referrer/UTM seen. This is a great improvement! I actually had a problem with this before.
Are you seeing Forbes everywhere in Google search results? Check out this in-depth case study on why.

AI

Is AI content worth it? John Doherty shared an insightful post about this on LinkedIn.
While I was on vacation with the family, we saw multiple Waymo cars picking folks up. I still can’t get used to a car without a driver as my Uber.
Ahrefs has released a new AI Content Helper tool. It’s free for all customers while it’s in beta.
Cloudflare has released a new AI audit tool. This allows you to better understand how AI is using your site and even eventually charge them to crawl your content.

Bitcoin (not financial advice)

Introducing StashPay, a bitcoin wallet for freelancers. It’s always fun trying new wallets.
A new bill introduced in the UK will give bitcoin protection under the law as personal property!
River has introduced proof of reserves. Every exchange should definitely be doing this.
Louisiana state government now accepts bitcoin as payment.
BNY gets the SEC’s go-ahead to custody bitcoin.
The SEC also approved Nasdaq to list options on iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF.
Is bitcoin protected under the First Amendment? It is just code, after all. A very interesting read, even if you don’t agree with it.
PayPal enables business accounts to buy, hold, and sell bitcoin. They are also enabling the ability to send it to external wallets.

When you live in the desert, you have to deal with an occasional scorpion. 🦂 How’s this for one? Yikes!

If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋

Tidbits from Brian