Tidbits from Brian - Issue #51
All I want for Christmas is pneumonia. šš¤
Sorry, this newsletter will be shorter than usual. Unfortunately, I had a cough for a few weeks, which developed into a fever. As most people do when they feel the flu coming on, you start loading up on vitamins, drinking more water, going to bed early, etc., to try to kick it before it gets too bad. š
Well, two days before Christmas, things went downhill really fast. As in, even over-the-counter medication wasnāt battling the fever. And I was downing Fishermanās Friend like candy just to breathe. I do have an autoimmune disease, so I have to take these things a little more seriously than others do.
Of course, having the horrible healthcare system we do in America, the first appointment available to see a primary care doctor was in February 2026. šŖ¦ And urgent care facilities send me straight to the hospital as they wonāt touch patients with an autoimmune disease (thatās another fun story). So I packed up my backpack and headed to the ER.
Seven miserable hours later, I came out with a pneumonia diagnosis on top of a viral infection. As of today, my body is still fighting it, but Iām slowly getting better. I havenāt missed a newsletter deadline for over 50 issues, so I didnāt want to start now. But I only have so much energy. š„±
Updates āļø
We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:
New options to export code snippets globally and import them to another site. š
You can also export code snippets individually or using the bulk select method.
New code snippets admin bar menu item that will show up if at least one snippet is present.
New frontend footer and admin footer locations for CSS code snippets.
New PMMU_PLUGIN_DIR constant to allow for manipulation of the MU plugin file location for specific setups where the standard WPMU_PLUGIN_DIR may be altered.
Added support for relative path URLs inside stylesheets printed inline with our perfmatters_rucss_inline_stylesheets filter. ā”
Updated previous separate block styles option which will now show up as a block style behavior dropdown for sites running WordPress 6.9+.
Added a REST API exception for Mollie.
Added additional built-in CSS selector exclusions for Elementorās background slideshow.
Fixed an issue in the code snippets editor where lint markers were not always correctly displaying for HTML and CSS snippets. šØāš»
Fixed an issue where HTML code snippets were not able to save a non-default location.
Fixed an issue where the code snippet editor was pushing new lines off screen in some cases and not automatically scrolling to keep things in view. š»
Fixed an issue with general Perfmatters admin notices not displaying correctly.
Fixed multiple duplicate ID warnings in the plugin UI.
Fixed multiple jQuery deprecation warnings in plugin UI JavaScript.
Brett and I both want to thank everyone who voted for our Perfmatters plugin in both the Monsterās Award 2025 and The WP Awards 2025. 2nd and 3rd place aināt too shabby! š We really appreciate it.
Interesting things š
Misc.
Have you tried Chromeās new split view feature yet? Not sure if I like it or hate it yet. š
Crucial is shutting down ā because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead.
How Netflix and Paramount sparked a $108 billion media war for Warner Bros. Discovery.
A post-mortem on the Cloudflare outage on December 5th.
WordPress
In case you missed it, the annual State of the Word is up. I enjoy watching these, as most of the year I have my head down building. So itās a good catch-up.
Cloudflare released its annual Radar report, where it analyzed websites associated with the top 5,000 domains. For CMS, WordPress accounted for 47%.
According to the State of Enterprise WordPress report, organizations using WordPress are increasing. 95% say they will continue to use the platform, up from 75% last year.
Marketing
There is a new Kanban solution on the market called Fizzy. Itās from the same team that built Basecamp. Here is a good 17-minute walkthrough if you just want to see everything.
I enjoyed this short post from BobWP on how he engages on social only when he wants to. I find myself much less vocal on social these days as well. Just so much noise, and I would rather focus on building.
Performance
Kinsta has rolled out PHP 8.5, along with their annual benchmark report.
TLDR: Slight increase on regular WordPress sites, but with WooCommerce, PHP 8.5 reached 71.02 req/s, a ~33% increase over PHP 8.4. š
Weāre running PHP 8.5 on all of our sites now with no issues. But always thoroughly test first.
BigScoots spent the last two years building a new solution, which will cache logged-in users. They give each authenticated visitor a private cache container. Itās stored on the edge. Personalized content is served from the userās container, not the origin server. That means up to 97% faster load times for logged-in users. Pretty impressive! Worth checking out. š„
WooCommerce 10.4 is out, and it comes with some performance improvements!
Interactivity API Mini Cart is the new default with smaller JS bundles.
The WooCommerce Admin and Analytics REST API namespaces are now lazy-loaded. Expect TTFB improvements of 30-60 ms when not needed. ā”
HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) Datastore caching feature moves out of experimental status and is now available as a standard option.
The latest version of Safari now supports the Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint metrics.
Highly recommend the HTML analyzer tool from Matt and the DebugBear team. Itās a quick way to spot issues. In this case, it was runaway inline SVG code from a few icons on a clientās site. š
Object Cache is now available for InstaWP sites on Plus plans and above. And smart image optimization (including WebP conversion) is now available on Pro plans and above. ā”
There was a change made with WP 6.9 in terms of when the WP-Cron is spawned (moving it from āinitā to the āshutdownā hook). This resulted in a significant boost in performance. Give a shout-out to Prashant for reporting this.
Did you know that Lighthouse has a Report Diff Tool? Itās actually pretty cool.
AI
An interesting read. Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?
OpenAI declares ācode redā as Google catches up in AI race. I can honestly say I donāt use ChatGPT anymore. I use Gemini and Claude.
I talked a lot about Waymo in my last newsletter. They just crossed 450,000 weekly paid rides. That is up from 250,000 weekly rides back in April. Wow.
Wishing everyone a happy New Year! š