Welcome to the 60th edition of Remkus’ Ramblings Newsletter. I’d like to highlight two things first in this beautifully round number edition.
- I’m adding newsletter sponsors going forward. The first sponsors have already signed up, but there’s still room for more sponsors to get in front of almost 500 subscribers. Learn more about rates and options here.
- I’ve recorded my first podcast with none other than Matt Medeiros. I’ll publish it everywhere next week, but you heard it here first. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit that notification bell 🔔 if you can’t wait to learn more about what we had to say about the WordPress media landscape 👀.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to it!
🗞 WordPress News
Lots of things happening in the world of WordPress, but not that much that stood out enough for me to mention in this section. Except for this one:
- How to use Gravity Forms notification routing with a lookup table to send bulk emails to various dedicated groups of people.
You know what my favorite types of WordPress content are? Real life case studies. Why? because more often than not, it sparks that part of my brain that translates the case study into something usable in my projects. And that’s exactly what Joost’s wonderful example did for me.
🚀 Performance
Using lazy loading to improve performance of certain assets loading onto your page is common used technique. Most often times used for images and iframes. What most people don’t know is that you can use it to lazy load background images as well. Those you load via the stylesheet, typically.
Paul Conroy explains how to do this here. Wonderful technique to help with those Core Web Vitals scores.
💡 Interesting finds
I work a lot with the terminal to connect to sites. Lots of chained WP CLI commands inside Bash scripts. My buddy Barry recommended a new terminal app that looks and behaves very nicely and quite a lot smarter than my current iTerm2 app. It’s called Warp. And I’m in love 😍.
🔆 WordPress Highlight
The highlight I wanted to share for this edition is a small thread I did on Twitter highlighting some ways to cut down those unnecessarily loaded CSS and JavaScript files injected by any and all plugins. Check out the comments by others as well, as you’ll find some neat plugins helping you clean up your source code.
📖 What I am reading
Two things this time.
- My dear friend Heather recently published a book which I found its way to my mailbox. Her book is called Understanding Privacy. Reading it will make you understand firmly that you don’t actually understand privacy (enough). Not as well as you should, anyway. Get your knowledge on privacy updated right now.
- For the second one, I’m just going to give you the title and let it work its curiosity on you. It did for me: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. Wonderful read.
🎁 Bonus
My bonus for this week is a wonderful tool to help you create amazing mockups. Long gone are the days of Balsamiq being our only choice here (I’m really showing my age here, aren’t I😅).
Enter Shots.
That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!
Best,
Remkus
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