Tidbits from Brian - Issue #52

My phone’s primary function is its biggest flaw. 📱

Jan 30, 2026

Spam calls have always been bad, but it seems like you can’t even use your phone anymore without setting up a whole first line of defense. I couldn’t agree more with this statement from Nic Carter.

According to the Robocall Index from YouMail, U.S. consumers received 52.5 billion robocalls in 2025. 😮 That’s up from 30 billion in 2016, and it’s been pretty steady at around 50 billion for the past five years.

If I turn off all screening, blocking, and don’t use any third-party apps, I get around 10-15 spam calls per day. I’m on the National Do Not Call Registry, but that’s pretty much worthless these days.

I have a few options. Either sign up for an app like Robokiller or silence all calls not in my contacts. The problem with silencing (even though it fixes 100% of the spam) is that you miss important calls. For example, I have a pest company that sprays around my house. But they use a random number each time they call. Adding all the businesses and services I use around town just doesn’t work well.

However, recently I started using Apple’s new screen-calling feature in iOS 26. I can say this works amazing! So much so that I dropped all silencing and third-party apps (some of which had this feature). Many Android users have had this feature for years.

For some reason, I guess spammers just don’t want to give Siri a reason for calling. 😅 The other handy feature is that it shows up on my laptop while I’m working, and I can choose to answer if it’s a legit call. The integration between iOS and macOS is very nice. On a sidenote, the new hold assist features also work great. Highly recommend trying them out if you haven’t already.

Updates ✍️

We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

Updated our lazy loading class to no longer add <noscript> tags on images or iframes. This results in a ~18% decrease in HTML code per image and a ~2% decrease in total HTML page size across the board! ⚡
- The perfmatters_lazyload_noscript filter can still be used to turn that behavior back on, although this shouldn’t be needed.

Added the ability to completely disable Perfmatters code features using the new PERFMATTERS_DISABLE_CODE constant. ⛔

Added separate used CSS generated files for different WooCommerce product types (product, variable, grouped, external). This drastically improves compatibility out of the box. Especially with products that use variable features like size and color selections. 👍
Added new perfmatters_cdn_url filter along with new helper methods in the CDN class.
Added additional logic to add an auto value to lazy loaded images sizes attributes when needed.
Added host name to global settings and code snippet export files to easily identify which site it came from.
Added confirmation message when turning on FastClick option.
Added logic to remove the previous stored author ID when a code snippet is imported.
Added dynamic request check in heartbeat function to prevent a possible PHP error.
Updated get_atts_array utility method to use regex instead of wp_kses_hair for better compatibility.
Reworked code snippet error handling class to work better with other exception handlers and existing error reporting.
Turned off CSSLint in the code snippet editor, as it is outdated and was leading to false positives.
Adjusted gutter column layout in the code snippet editor to be more consistent between different code types.
Adjusted code snippet priority field to allow both negative and zero input values.
Fixed an issue where CSS code snippets set to run in the footer were not having their conditions checked.
Fixed an issue where CSS code snippets were not always printing where expected based on the set location and priority.
Fixed an issue with certain code snippet input fields not being escaped properly in the UI leading to a broken layout in some cases.
Fixed an issue where YouTube iframes rendered with a preview thumbnail that had autoplay forced off in their query string would require a double click.
Fixed an issue where the referrerpolicy iframe attribute did not get applied to the generated iframe when using YouTube preview thumbnails.

We also pushed out an update for our Novashare WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:

Added new share button for Mistral AI.
Overhauled the meta box UI to be more consistent and improve selected image visibility. Many of you requested larger thumbnails to better reflect what will be shared on social, especially Pinterest.

Changed the hidden Pinterest images to use image thumbnails for the src attribute instead of the full image to save on page load. ⚡
Made some minor adjustments to various network SVG viewBox values to be more consistent throughout the plugin. 👨‍🎨
Updated EDD plugin updater class to version 1.9.4.
Fixed a PHP warning that would sometimes show up when checking for post short links.

On February 26th, we’re doing a deep dive into why we built a performance-first code snippet manager into Perfmatters and how you can take full advantage of it on your WordPress sites. ⚡

Shout-out to Kyle from The Admin Bar for putting this together. You can register in advance to watch live. Hope to see you there!

Interesting things 🔎

Misc.

Meet Mole. An open-source all-in-one toolkit to deep clean and optimize your Mac.
The Astro web framework joins Cloudflare.
Gmail says goodbye to Gmailify and POP3: what you need to know.
Vertical tabs are coming to Google Chrome. You can enable them early with a flag. FYI, I hate vertical tabs. 😂 But I know a lot of people like them.
Check out how to enable smoother 120Hz browsing in Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Here’s how long it really takes to form a new habit.
VWO and AB Tasty join forces. I used both of these a lot back in my agency days.
One of my favorite apps right now is SoundSource, and their new 6.0+ version is beautiful. It allows you to change the volume per app. I use it a lot while working with Brett on FaceTime. We each have music playing in the background. 🎵

WordPress

The Accelerate plugin looks interesting. It’s A/B testing, but built for the block editor. So you get analytics on each block test.
Amber Hinds dives into why they don’t use block libraries at Equalize Digital. An interesting read.
The future of WooCommerce - a conversation with Matt Mullenweg. Brought to you by James Kemp & Katie Keith. 🛍️
Check out these three surprises from Patrick on a migration from WooCommerce to Shopify.
If you’re selling plugins using Easy Digital Downloads, you’ve most likely run into 403 errors when it comes to licensing. Cristian published an excellent walkthrough on how to get a proxy workaround up and running.
Introducing Changelog as a Service (CaaS). A free WordPress plugin for publishing changelogs on your site, with an optional submission to ChangelogWP for discovery.
Always worth running new audit tools on your site once in a while to see if you’ve missed something. This Quit Risk Audit tool is interesting!
I don’t usually like to get into politics, but I found this response from WordPress.org to be very childish. 🤔 And I’m not the only one.
View transitions are coming to the admin dashboard in WordPress 7.0. The frontend is also being considered (#64471).

Marketing

Digg is back. Not that we need yet another social network, but it’s kind of nostalgic. I used Digg a lot back in the day.

Performance

TTFB doesn’t mean what you think it means. This is probably one of the best articles I’ve ever read on the topic. ⚡
Why would a browser pause rendering page content once it’s already started? A great share from Matt at DebugBear.
The 2025 Web Almanac by HTTP Archive has been officially released! So many awesome datapoints, too many to list. Worth checking out. 🤓
Barry dives into fixing the URL parameters performance penalty.
Chrome DevTools now supports individual network request throttling! This is awesome, I have already started using it. Note: They pulled it from the default in Chrome 144, but you can still enable it. It’s coming back in Chrome 145.
I’m still learning things every day, such as I didn’t know you could use filter commands like “larger-than” in Chrome DevTools. Tip from Web Weekly #180.

WPBakery 9.0 introduces a smarter approach to CSS loading. The core analyzes which CSS is actually used and splits it accordingly. This prevents unused CSS and oversized files. In their internal testing, they saw up to 60% improvement in performance. Looks promising, coming later this year!
The status of jQuery Migrate in WordPress 6.9 and beyond. This thing just won’t die. 🤦‍♂️
Speaking of jQuery, 4.0 is out! If you compare the compressed/minified version to 3.7.1 in WordPress core, it’s 10.23% smaller. But I doubt we’ll see this in core anytime soon due to compatibility.

AI

Apple picks Google’s Gemini AI for its big Siri upgrade. I use Gemini as my primary AI tool, so I’m all for this!
Google increased the Gemini usage limit on its paid plans. I swear, half the messages on social media now are people talking about AI limits.

ChatGPT will soon start showing ads, but they won’t affect its responses. Google has promised no ads, for now. 😜
Anthropic released their Cowork preview. Basically, a visual tool for anyone not comfortable with Claude Code.
The VS Code extension for Claude Code is now generally available.
Stack Overflow’s forum is dead thanks to AI, but the company’s still kicking, thanks to AI.
Kling Motion Control is pretty crazy! It’s basically AI for character swapping.
Bandcamp takes a stand against AI music, banning it from the platform.
Introducing Helix 02. OK, now things are getting interesting! That hip bump to close the drawer. 🤣

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

Tidbits from Brian

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