Tidbits from Brian - Issue #45
AI changed everything regarding content marketing. 🤖🪦
This video from Andrew Schmelyun on AI popularity and decreasing views is spot on to what I've been thinking about lately regarding AI and marketing (content, video, etc.). 💭
I've been blogging and doing SEO for 17+ years. My whole strategy (coming from an IT background) was that when encountering a problem at work, I share the fix on the web (in easy-to-follow steps), and rinse and repeat. 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣ = 📈
That strategy worked extremely well for many years to grow traffic organically. But with the rise of AI, this will never really be the same.
As Andrew mentioned, I also find myself going to an AI tool 80-85% of the time to find my answers now. 🤖 Why waste time Googling or watching a video, if I can just immediately get the answer. 🕰️ Obviously, fact checking, hallucinations, etc., are still important to keep in mind. But AI has drastically increased my productivity and workflows (researching, troubleshooting, etc.), and it only continues to do so.
Take Stack Overflow, for example. Has it become completely irrelevant? Data from January 2025 suggested the answer is likely “yes.” Since then, things have gone from bad to worse. I used to visit Stack Overflow all the time, but now I rarely find myself hitting their site.
I sold one of my health niche blogs two years ago because it was becoming obvious that AI was just going to keep consuming everything. 💵 Looking back, that was the right choice (especially with my other time commitments outside of content production).
Honestly, I think we are still in a transition period, and I don't know what the future holds exactly. While many marketing strategies have changed, it's also exciting. It feels like the wild wild west of the early internet, where anything goes and everyone is experimenting. 🤠
I'm always going to keep producing content of some kind; it's in my blood. But I'm incorporating AI into every workflow I can to try and keep up. Adapt or die. 💪
Updates ✍️
We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:
New advanced preload option to enable Cloudflare Early Hints (BETA) for Perfmatters preloads, along with controls to limit which file types will have early hint link headers sent. This can help improve LCP by loading resources sooner (no waiting for HTML parsing). ⚡
New WP-CLI import-settings subcommand to import a settings configuration from an exported .json file.
New WP-CLI disable and enable subcommands to modify certain plugin options. Available options can be printed out with the new get-options subcommand. 👨💻
New delay JS quick exclusion for SureCart.
Added additional logic to disable speculative loading on WooCommerce cart and checkout URLs. 🛒
Added additional logic to allow fallback deferral exclusions as part of an existing delay JS quick exclusion.
Added built-in exclusion for Gravity Forms to prevent optimization features from running on AJAX form requests.
Updated CSS parsing library to the latest version (8.8.0). Bug fixes and deprecations.
Adjusted placement of perfmatters_preloads filter which was running too early and causing some filter snippets to be ignored. 🏁
Increased default delay timeout from 10 to 15 seconds to improve compatibility.
Fixed an issue with certain parent selector matching functions where a child element selector tag would also be replaced if it had the exact same selector tag HTML as the matched parent tag.
Fixed multiple redundant calls to retrieve Script Manager settings row when loading the Script Manager UI. 🔽
We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:
Refactored specific portions of the main frontend stylesheet. We were able to reduce the CSS file size by an additional 7.69% (now under 2.5 KB)! ⚡ We recommend that you clear all cache layers (Unused/Critical CSS, server cache, CDN cache) after updating to take advantage of the speed gains.
Added new novashare_page_builders filter.
Added new Pinterest image pin options for Image Placement to control which images get pin buttons added. The novashare_pinterest_image_excluded filter that was previously used for whitelisting will still work for the time being, but that will now be managed in the UI going forward.
Started work on moving more universal style properties like button size and button margin to CSS variables.
Cleaned up and removed redundant inline style overrides for inline content buttons.
Fixed an issue where floating bar buttons were being added to the Bricks editor UI.
Fixed an issue where Facebook share button was not working correctly on mobile.
Also, in case you missed it, I did a website performance AMA with Kyle earlier this month. We covered various topics and questions related to speeding up your WordPress sites.
Interesting things 🔎
Misc.
Elizabeth Holmes is back (sort of). You can't make this stuff up. 😂🤦♂️ For anyone not familiar with the original story of Theranos, the Hulu show was pretty good.
Trying to grab a domain? The Notifydomain service notifies you when domains become available. You can track up to three domains in the free plan!
Nintendo’s Switch 2 is the fastest-selling game console of all time. 😮
I’ve been using Snagit for years, but CleanShot just added the option to automatically convert screenshots to sRGB color profile in version 4.8. I requested this back in 2020, as it was a dealbreaker for me. I might revisit CleanShot now to see how it stacks up again.
This Robinhood founder might just revolutionize energy (if he succeeds) by beaming solar power back down to earth. ☀️
I binged Squid Game season 3 this last weekend. 🦑 What a wild ride! Better than season 2. Although nothing will compare to watching season 1 for the first time.
Windows is getting rid of the Blue Screen of Death after 40 years. Good memories. 😜
Some personal thoughts on WWDC and things that stood out for my workflow.
Pinning favorite music playlists will come in handy. 📌
Liquid glass looks cool, but not quite sure yet about those corners or transparency yet. 🤔
The Apple Music app getting a possible redesign has me excited. 🎵
Apple Notes markdown export. This is great if you're moving to other tools like Obsidian, Ulysses, Bear, etc.
Phone app on my Mac? This sounds awesome. If my airpods are already in, I don't need to grab my phone. 📱
Call screening and hold assist. If these work well, they could be a huge timesaver. I've had the silence unknown callers feature enabled for years on my phone due to spam. 🤦♂️
Improved audio quality for airpods. 🔈
Digital IDs for passports and boarding passes with links to terminal maps. 🪪✈️
Lots of new Spotlight features and shortcuts. But time will tell. Raycast ain't going anywhere yet.
Quite a few improvements are coming to Safari.
Journal app is coming to iPad and Mac. I think this is a promising app, just wasn’t very useful before being mobile only.
An easier way to run Linux containers in macOS (or rather, without Docker)? 😮 Here is another post about it.
Supposedly there are new cursors?
On June 12th, Google Cloud brought half the internet down, including Cloudflare (post-mortem). That was a fun day. 😅
WordPress
GenerateBlocks 2.2 brings the new Site Header and Navigation blocks! This release allows you to now create navigation and headers beyond the Customizer. They don’t have search option yet, but there is a way to make this work.
Meet FluentCart, the newest WordPress ecommerce solution coming to town from the team behind Fluent Forms. 🛒 It’s an alternative for Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce, and SureCart. I’m all for more competition in this space, as it makes them all better in the longterm.
Speaking of ecommerce, Easy Digital Downloads just released a much needed update for one-click payment updates (both Stripe and PayPal). This will definitely save me some time on billing tickets! You can add them to reminder emails, payment failure emails, etc.
The SureRank Release Candidate is now live! A simple, lightweight SEO assistant. It’s from the same team that makes Astra. I’m all for more competition in the SEO space, especially those that are more performance focused. 📈
Why WordPress keeps winning: What users love and how to avoid plugin fatigue.
WooCommerce 9.9 has introduced a new Blueprint import and export feature to speed up configurations by copying settings across new installations.
New FAIR project aims to decentralize WordPress.org services, backed by Linux Foundation and hundreds of contributors.
InstaWP v3 is here with a lot of improvements and changes:
Moving to pay-as-you-go plans. Current customers are grandfathered in if you don’t want to change.
Each site now has its own plan, giving you fine-grained control.
New UI/dashboard for site management.
InstaWP Live will be wp.cloud in the coming weeks.
Free tier now requires credit card.
New data center in Australia (Sydney). 🇦🇺
Activity Log Pro is a new plugin (in beta) that tracks user actions, security events, and system changes on your WordPress site. It’s also cheaper than some of the other alternatives. Worth checking out!
Joost de Valk dives into some data around the state of innovation within the WordPress ecosystem. Core updates have slowed, and contributions from key players are either leveling or even declining. Should we be worried?
Performance
DebugHawk for WordPress coming is soon. It’s like Query Monitor and an APM tool combined to monitor both front and backend performance, without all the crazy complexity! I’ve been playing around with it, very promising so far. ⚡
Felix has launched the View Transitions plugin. It adds a fade when navigating the site, making transitions smooth and essentially hiding that hard reload behavior. It’s about improving “perceived performance.” However, after testing, I’m still on the fence. 😅 Probably going to be more of a personal preference.
Chrome achieves highest score ever on Speedometer 3.1, saving users millions of hours.
Cloudflare Containers are now available in beta. This is pretty massive news! It means a step closer to possibly hosting (not just caching/serving) your entire WordPress site at the edge. 🔥
Speaking of Cloudflare. I’m a big fan of their services and have used them on all of our sites for years. However, their support is absolutely horrible. I have a paid account and opened a ticket on June 2nd. As of June 30th, they haven’t responded. Thankfully I resolved the issue myself, but talk about bad. 🤦♂️
Are website INP scores getting worse or better? Check out some of the data from the Chrome User Experience Report.
WooCommerce 9.9 is much faster! In testing, they measured up to 95% reductions in page load times across critical admin screens. 🚀
AI
Meet Dia, a new AI focused Chromium based web browser. If you previously tried Arc, you can install it right now.
LLMS.txt isn’t robots.txt: It’s a treasure map for AI. Yoast released a new feature to generate an llms.txt file your WordPress site. 🗃️
One issue I found with the new Yoast feature is they don’t yet support the automatic exclusion of individual posts set as noindex. Meaning it might grab things like your privacy policy or content you would rather exclude.
ChatGPT and Perplexity indexes are now live in Ahrefs Brand Radar (Gemini and Microsoft Copilot coming soon). This is basically like Site Explorer for LLMs. Pretty cool!
Google AI Mode traffic data comes to Search Console.
Someone used Veo3 to make Moses as a YouTuber live-streaming the Exodus. 😂
If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋