My word, can you believe it’s 2023 already? I remember the time when I was looking forward to entering a new millennium, and now I’m bracing myself for how fast the years since are going 😱.
It’s a mixed feeling fore sure, because I do like fast things 😏. Like how the number of subscribers is growing! More than 120 new subscribers since I picked up publishing my newsletter in November of last year. A warm welcome to all of you!
Anyway, happy new year, and may 2023 bring you exactly what you need, and more! Let’s see what stood out in the last two weeks, shall we?
🗞 WordPress News
- To be specific, Jb Audras’ post on Make WordPress Core on what happened in core in 2022 stood out for me the most.
So much so that I ended up writing an entire blog post about my opinions about what that data tells us, and more importantly to me, what it does not show. I’ve titled my blog post “What Is a WordPress Contribution“. I think the title kinda gives away where my thoughts go, but do read it. As well as Jb Audras’ comments below it. And let me know if you agree or not!
- Remember that I mentioned I’ll be producing WordPress related courses? Well, I’ve landed on the what the first one will be about. Working smarter with WP CLI.
- Ross Morsali launched a new site which, given the name of the site, will host a number of coding related content.
I like this article of his about creating cron jobs in WordPress plugins.
🚀 Performance
Introducing a dedicated performance related section. This will sometimes be a simple pointer in terms of a performance minded solution or go of the deep end and be super technical. Or something in between that’s a bit more accessible (but not today).
- Anyway, Novashare by the brothers Brian and Brett Jackson is a nifty performance minded social sharing plugin. It’s developed from the ground up with a performance-focused approach for Google Core Web Vitals.
I think Social Sharing underneath articles is dead in the water, but maybe I’m being too cynical. Prove me wrong if you have data to back up the contrary, please! Either way, check it out if your site does have a lot of interaction to the socials and needs to be fast while facilitating that functionality. Spoiler alert: all sites do.
- Did you know that Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all disagree on how important certain assets like JavaScript, CSS, and images are?! I don’t need to tell you this varying behavior has major implications for (figuring out) optimal web performance. This article on Perfplanet is a deep dive into the technical bits related to this in the context of HTTP/3.
A must read if you hardcore optimizing is your thing.
💡 Interesting finds
- WordPress needs content, and content could really do with SEO in order to stand out. I’ve mentioned WordPress & AI before, but I want to share Aleyda Solis’ article on how to use ChatGPT for SEO as well. Lots of interesting things in her article.
- Here’s another interesting thing some of you will appreciate. HTTPie AI is a cool and new way to interact with APIs.
🔆 WordPress Highlight
The WordPress highlight of the week is for all you polyglots out there. Or, this is an option as well, all of you out there building sites for polyglots. Bernard Kau (finally) updated one of the coolest plugins I use on quite a few sites. It’s called Language Fallback and it allows you to choose a language as fallback. And, every time a translation file is loaded, the plugin will then load the fallback, if a translation for the originally chosen language was not found. I love it. Thanks Bernard!
📖 What I am reading
Heather Burns, who is, FTR, my favorite person called Heather, wrote a new book for Smashing Magazine called “Understanding Privacy“. I highly encourage you to read the introduction and to purchase her book. It’ll give a good grasp on how to create an inclusive, safe, and privacy-aware digital experiences. Dive into it here.
🎁 Bonus
Two bonus items. Two whole bonus items. Amazing, isn’t it?!
- My favorite password manager, 1Password, added wonderful addition to their service by now providing 1Password for SSH & Git. Making it the single source of truth for all your SSH keys. It allows you to generate and import SSH keys, configure Git commit signing (this is huge!), authenticate Git and SSH workflows. And this is cool too, autofill public keys in your browser for Git and other cloud platforms. Wow. Just wow. For more information on this service, check out their docs.
- If you’ve not seen yet, my friend Jamie Marsland publishes wonderful YouTube videos on the future of WordPress (mainly Gutenberg project related stuff). It’s a wonderful visual way of learning what will be part of your next WordPress version.
That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!
Best,
Remkus
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