Tidbits from Brian - Issue #49
The fragility of the internet. 💥 Not everything needs to be smart.
The last two weeks have been crazy with technical issues affecting critical services that power the web. First, we had a single point of failure that triggered the AWS outage affecting millions around the globe. It took down everything from Ring security cameras and messaging services (Intercom and Signal), Amazon package tracking, and even caused beds to get stuck upright and overheat. 🤦♂️
Whenever a big outage like this happens, it’s always a reminder that not everything needs to be “smart.” I’m glad AWS didn’t literally interrupt my sleep, since I’m still rocking a “dumb” boxspring mattress. And yet, sitting right next to me, I have an air purifier connected to my Wi-Fi. Does it really need this? No.
Second, Cloudflare had a major issue that many didn’t even realize. On October 24th (Friday morning, of course 😅), Cloudflare’s compression stopped working, and I started seeing this on dozens of sites across different hosting providers. This meant that the size of HTML pages suddenly went from ~60 KB to ~300 KB. You multiply this by 500 URLs, and it’s not good. It took them a while to acknowledge this, but they fixed it over the weekend.
Third, a major outage hit Microsoft Azure right before sending this newsletter. Taking down services like Microsoft 365, Xbox, creating network connectivity in Outlook, and even my mortgage company.
It’s alarming when you think about how fragile the internet still is in 2025. While everyone markets and claims to have multiple redundancies in place, the reality is that there are still single points of failure everywhere (from AWS to Cloudflare). We’re always one little DNS issue away from throwing the digital world into chaos. 🔥 Another reason why not everything we own needs to be smart.
Updates ✍️
We pushed out a couple of updates for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:
New perfmatters_rucss_inline_stylesheets filter. This allows you to inline any stylesheet already excluded from used CSS. ⚡ See more on how to optimize used CSS exclusions.
Reworked the Script Manager input change event listener for better compatibility with other JavaScript running while the Script Manager is being used.
Added new delay JS quick exclusion for GenerateBlocks Pro.
Added built-in CSS selector exclusion for GenerateBlocks mobile menu. 📱
Added built-in stylesheet exclusion for GeneratePress local fonts.
Updated WS Form Pro delay JS quick exclusion to fix a console error.
Fixed some incorrect wording in the clear used CSS tooltip.
Stay tuned for our biggest Perfmatters feature update of the year coming in November! 😁🔥
We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:
New AI share buttons for Claude and Google AI, which link to a prompt that will summarize the shared post’s content. 🤖
New novashare_ai_network_text filter. Allows you to adjust the text that is passed through to an AI network prompt.
New support to set the Novashare license key via wp-config.php using the NOVASHARE_LICENSE_KEY constant. 🔑 This has been highly requested from our agency clients.
Removed Pocket share network from the plugin, as they have shut down.
Want to get notified of Perfmatters and Novashare changelog updates? You can now, thanks to a new project called ChangelogWP from Ryan Logan and Derek Ashauer.
We also need your help. If you’ve enjoyed using our Perfmatters or Novashare plugins, we would greatly appreciate a vote in the 2025 Monster’s Award (deadline is November 20).
Interesting things 🔎
Misc.
Thai commercials are hilarious. 😂
I’m a big 80s movie buff, but somehow I had never seen the 1982 Tron. What a wild ride, I loved it!
Brussels wants to fix Europe’s cookie law that messed up the internet. 🍪 Cookie banners are pretty pointless. You either accept everything or reject everything; nobody is reading them. It would be better to do something at the browser level.
WordPress
FluentCart is officially here! If you are looking for an ecommerce alternative to WooCommerce, EDD, or SureCart, definitely one to check out.
Is PHP dead in 2025? Check out the stats and market share.
Freemius just lowered its fees for everyone. 👏 Their pricing makes a lot more sense now as you grow.
Kinsta released two awesome updates this month:
You can now push a live or staging environment from one site to another. Handy when creating a new site based on an existing site’s configuration or moving a site to a different data center. 🚚
Bandwidth-based plans are now available. I know many clients who have been wanting this. Choose whatever works best for you, bandwidth or visits.
Activity Log Pro version 1.0.2 is now available, and it comes with automated activity digest email reports. 📨
Marketing
Trello finally got recurring due dates! 🎉 Sometimes it’s the little things.
Performance
Gerard did a deep dive into the performance differences between FluentCart and WooCommerce. ⚡
WebPageTest has had a complete redesign, and so far it’s looking great. Check out their blog post with more details about the changes.
Firefox got two pretty big updates:
It now supports the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric.
View transitions are in every browser now. ✨
Why does your site fail Core Web Vitals’ CLS, but shows a perfect score in PSI? 🤔 A great post from Joshua explaining why.
DebugBear’s free INP Debugger tool now also reports what scripts delay user interactions, based on the Long Animation Frames API.
AI
It begins. You can now preorder NEO, the home robot. Although I agree with Joanna Stern, “The next few years won’t be about owning a capable robot; they’ll be about raising one.” 🤖👦
Kids are offloading their critical thinking to AI chatbots. Growing up in a world with AI has its negatives. I remember running out of the 10 free hours of dial-up internet for the month (NetZero), which meant I had to go outside and play. Parenting methods are going to be that much more important going forward.
Imagine v0.9 is out, a new video generation model with massive upgrades from v0.1.
AI browser Dia launches publicly on Mac, as well as ChatGPT Atlas. I’ve tried a few of these AI browsers and still keep going right back to Chrome. Maybe in time.
Spam works. Repetition works. Recency works. Check out what Rand Fishkin learned about how to show up in LLM answers and AI tool results.
Gemini 2.5 Flash rolls out to everyone, including more aspect ratios for social media. The improvements are pretty impressive. The image below was generated using AI from a photo on the beach. I’ll be honest, it’s almost to the point where I can’t tell the difference anymore.
If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋