Hello 👋🏻!
Can you believe it’s the second week of the year already?! And a Friday the 13th to boot. But fear not, this newsletter will only bring you good luck as yours truly is born on the thirteenth of the month. You know, double negatives and all 🤓
While we’re on the topic, I would very much appreciate your input. I’ve gotten some feedback on the publishing day of this newsletter. Questioning whether Friday’s are the best day of the week. Please cast your vote here.
But, let’s get to it. Let’s get into this week’s newsletter.
🗞 WordPress News
This felt like a relatively quiet week in the World of WordPress, but I think that’s mostly because everybody was booting up their work (pace) again. But, nevertheless, I have some to share with you.
Remember that blog post I did recently about What is a WordPress Contribution? Here’s a small story about how a thought, a tweet led to another type of contribution. Let me explain.
The last couple of months I’ve seen a few things pop up on my radar about some really old tickets live in WordPress’ ticket system. Trac, for the initiated. When I say really old, I’m talking well over a decennium. Which is half of WordPress’ age, basically. And I think that’s crazy long. Ridiculously long, even. So, I tweeted the following:
And in the tweet below, I tagged a few folks. Because, in my mind, doing this as a bug cleaning exercise does two things. Clean up and improve. Cleaning up bugs in WordPress and open tickets. Improving morale among WordPress users, developers, core committers.
The tweet sparked an interesting conversation to which Matt Mullenweg eventually answered the following:
I’d be happy to look at one of those a month this year. Let’s plan it out.
– Matt Mullenweg
Which is awesome! It’s a great example of how raising an idea can lead up to seeing the change you want to see. Jb Audras is working on a post on the Make WordPress Core blog that will come up with a plan based on my suggestion.
- 10up released an update to their Ad Refresh Control Plugin. It allows publishers to enable the refreshing of their ads without needing to make any modifications to their existing ad implementation.
Great example of a plugin that generally goes under the radar, but that is a wonderful tool for those working with publishers and ad platforms.
🚀 Performance
Performance optimization of your site is way more than just optimizing CSS, JavaScript and images. A lot more. An often times overlooked element is preventing bad actors to touch your server at all. For me, that’s where Cloudflare shines with its Web Application Firewall (WAF).
💡 Interesting finds
- It should come as no surprise that I’m a big proponent of open sourced software. If you’re like me and you’d like to attend events around open source projects, check out Mesrenyame Dogbe’s excellent list of open source events for 2023. These are not your default events, and you won’t find a WordCamp in that list either. Still great to check out.
- Barsee published a twitter thread listing 10 wonderfully useful ChatGPT Chrome Extensions that I think are well worth your time to check out. They work in Brave (my favorite browser), Edge and Arc as well, btw.
- I also stumbled across (remember that one?!) a site that states they are the Complete Resource Of Artificial Intelligence Tools & Services. Dunno about the validity of that, but I found plenty of AI’s I did not know yet.
🔆 WordPress Highlight
InstaWP is an interesting service that allows you to create WordPress websites for testing and staging. They also have a plugin that helps you with that. Check it out if your hosting doesn’t have built in staging.
📖 What I am reading
As mentioned in a previous newsletter, I have read James Clear’s Atomic Habits again. I do this every now and then when I feel like it would beneficial. To read James’ words is wonderful, but to hear him talk is even better. And in that context, I’d love to share James’ appearance on Tim Ferriss’ podcast with you all. Learnt so much more there, and hope you do too!
🎁 Bonus
Technically, the year of AI started last year IMO, but we ware seeing a flood of cool new AI tools, aren’t we? Here’s another one called restorePhotos.io. If you have old and blurry face photos, AI can restore them. Four out of the five images I tried came back MUCH better. I’m impressed. Go and check them out!
That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!
Best,
Remkus
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