Ramblings. Number 62. Can’t believe it’s gone so fast, but right before number 61 was published, I noticed I was exactly one subscriber away from 500 subscribers. I did a shout out on the socials asking who would want to be lucky number 500 and it that turned out to be Torsten Landsiedel. Little did he know I had already featured him 😁. Welcome, Torsten, and also a warm welcome to the rest of you as well.
You gotta love little synchronicities like that. Thanks for riding with me everyone 🏇🏻.
Today’s Ramblings are sponsored by DLX Plugins. They have one of the neatest solutions with Quotes DLX. It’s a replacement block for the Quotes Block with Twitter sharing built in. And lot’s of extra features which make it fully customizable and themeable. My other favorite is Comment Edit Pro which now has Cloudflare Turnstile integrated. Love it. I use it on many client sites.
Let’s dive in what this week brought us through my lens 🔎
🗞 WordPress News
Here’s what popped up on my radar this past week:
- Koen Reus’ answer to Mark Howells-Mead’s question reminded me of Felix’ Arntz article on how to store confidential data in WordPress again. Mark’s question was: “A third-party API needs a username/password combo, so I need to store this in the WordPress plugin settings. The pw needs to be encrypted but recoverable so I can use it for the API call. Is this achievable? oAuth isn’t an option because the API doesn’t support it.”.
It’s a great read where Felix explains everything it entails well. And with all the security updates we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks, it’s something you should force yourself to read if you’ve not recently. That is, if you’d like to store data confidentially in WordPress 🤓
- We have an update on the WordPress & WebP story. Javier Casares walks us through it.
- Alex Standiford blogged about a two very niche things that I enjoyed a lot. One is BerlinDB (Custom Database solution created during WordCamp Europe in Berlin) and the other is expiration dates on taxonomies.
- The WordPress Core Performance team wrote about what their focus for 2023 is going to be on. I liked what the list looks like: Server response time, Database optimization, JavaScript & CSS, Images, Measurement, and the Ecosystem tools.
I can’t tell you enough how happy I am we have this dedicated team now 😍.
🚀 Performance
- CSS Container Queries are here, and here’s everything you want to know about it in terms of WordPerf things.
- Very nice list of debug scripts you can use for your Lighthouse tests.
- Did you know we can have historical web performance data via the CrUX History API? I didn’t either.
💡 Interesting finds
- Most of you are familiar with Loom or Cleanshot, but Screen Studio is also a very nice tool to record screen recordings with. Not sure if it will pull me away from Cleanshot, but man, is it beautifully designed 😍.
- Tejas Rane shared an extensive tutorial on how to start a niche site. Normally I’m not too hot for this type of content, but Tejas actually shares some interesting bits. Have a read and see for yourself.
- I love having shell access–working with WP CLI. In fact, it is a requirement for all of the hosting my clients use. If it’s not available, we first move, then start fixing properly. Anyway, came across an interesting website called LearnShell.org. It, uhm, allows you to learn shell? Time to learn about the next level of “just having command line access” and do fun things with Bash.
🔆 WordPress Highlight
- I came across in my research is FluentCRM. It’s a tool with a bit more bells and whistles, but it’s on my list to try out for myself. Maybe something you’d enjoy, too?
One of my clients recently needed a CRM solution to go with their Gravity Forms powered and Mailchimp integrated WordPress site. I landed on something super simple for them with a little bit of Zapier added to the mix of Glide Apps.
- Another oldie but goldie: 10UP’s Distributor plugin. Distributor is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to syndicate and reuse content across your websites — whether in a single multisite or across the web.
📖 What I am reading
- Rolling Stone magazine did an extensive essay on one of my favorite bands: LIVE. I hadn’t really kept track of all their struggles and challenges, but this explained a lot of what I had seen over the years. Well worth a read.
🎁 Bonus
If you had to, how could you recapture 20 hours a week? I don’t have the answer necessarily, but I saw Christine Carillo ask this question on Twitter and I enjoyed some of the answers she got.
That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!
Best,
Remkus
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