From the changelog:

• new: also works on (manual) excerpts; just add a httpv link to the “excerpt” field on the post/page admin (based on feedback from Ruben@tuttingegneri)
• new: if youtube-url contains “start” or “showinfo” parameters, these are used when playing the actual video. This means that you can now jump to a specific time in the YouTube video or stop the title/ author from being displayed (based on feedback from a.o. Miguel and Josh D)
• update: javascript now initiates either after full page load or after 1 second (whatever comes first), thus avoiding video not showing due to other requests taking too long
• update: bonus feature stops lockerz.com tracking by addtoany (you’ll still want to hide the “earn pointz” tab though)
• bugfix: prevent the playing video to be in front of e.g. a dropdown-menu or lightbox (thanks to Matt Whittingham)
• bugfix: solve overlap between player and text when option was set not to show links (reported by Josh D)

And an appropriate vid to go with this new release:

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Embedding HTML5 YouTube video with WP YouTube Lyte
• WP YouTube Lyte 0.9.0: size matters
• The bulleted WP YouTube Lyte bulletin

The bottom-line: if you’re European and you were supporting the great anti-SOPA-protests in the U.S., this is the time to act yourself! Spread the word and sign one or more of these petitions against ACTA:

• Belgium Against ACTA
• Just say “NO” to ACTA
• stopp-acta.info petition

The video:

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Embedding HTML5 YouTube video with WP YouTube Lyte
• Enhanced privacy for embedded YouTube
• Lite YouTube Embeds in WordPress

Great stuff, really; create a simple script by providing a URL, choose what datacenters you want the test to run from, set the interval and there you go. After a couple of minutes you can start gazing at charts & reports or check your mailbox for alerts. You can create more complex tests using a JavaScript-based syntax or you can import Selenium-scripts (hello Selenium IDE for FireFox). The free account I started out with offers a substantial amount of pageviews/ month (40.000) that tests can generate.

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Google Webmaster Tools Irony
• Who’s re-baking my cookies?
• Fun with RFP’s: organizing a RAD-race

I’ve contacted the developer (Pat’s a swell guy, really) and he answered he would look into honoring the DoNotTrack header, which he wrote he’d love to include in Q1 somewhere. In the mean time, if you have AddToAny on your site, you can already hide the Lockerz “Earn” tab. And if you’re on WordPress, you could install (or upgrade) WP DoNotTrack, which I’ve updated to stop the Lockerz tracking (make sure lockerz.com is your blacklist).

If there’s a Drupalista out there that uses AddToAny and would like to stop Lockerz tracking; I’d be happy to co-author a Drupal DoNotTrack module, do get in touch!

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Why your WordPress blog needs DoNotTrack
• AddToAny: removing the “spy” from the share-ware
• AddToAny removed-from-here

Well, if you’re in a hurry, you could compare price and features via cdnplanet.com. The info might not always be complete, but it does give you a good first idea and you can always visit the CDN’s proper site for more details, can’t you?

After comparing features & pricing, you really should get an idea of the speed of these CDN’s, of their performance relative to your customers. I found this CDN Speed Test on cloudclimate.com very useful; it performs a live test of approximately 20 CDN providers, requesting a 64 kilobyte file 10 times for each CDN from within your browser. So if you can get a sample of your customers to perform that test and provide you with the results, you’ll have some very useful information about performance. Together with your overview of features and price, you should be able to make at least a vaguely educated decision, no?

To have an idea about performance for our market (Belgium), I asked some Facebook-friends to provide me with the results of the CDN Speed Test. Most data I received was for Telenet or Skynet/Belgacom, not coincidentally the biggest ISP’s here. You can see the aggregated results in that ugly table on the left (or a couple of paragraphs up, if you’re subscribed to the RSS-feed).

My conclusion: as I was looking for a pay-as-you-go (no obligations, no monthly fee) CDN for static files, with support for Origin-Pull, HTTPS and some administration features (for example to purge the cache and watch nice graphs), MaxCDN fit the picture pretty well. With a great introductory price ($40 for the first Terabyte and even less if you find the coupon code) and performance that is at 113% of the fastest competitor, they seem to have found somewhat of a sweet spot for my specific context.

The only problem; I’ve got to wait for a “GO” from some people higher up the food chain. Maybe I should already implement it on my blog, just for the fun of it?

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Google Webmaster Tools Irony
• High performance YouTube embeds
• Firefox 4 beta007: the thunderball we’ve been waiting for

This blog:

• 121 blogposts (69 “real” posts and 52 aggregated lifestream-events)
• 75,913 pageviews, the most popular individual article being Kate Bush live (en bijna bloot) (7209 views). Off all new 2011 blogposts, Audio-only YouTube embedding with WP YouTube Lyte 0.7 was read most (2683 views).
• 317 comments (approx. half of which are bound to be my own replies to other people’s comments)
• Main goal for 2012: keep on learning, sharing and enjoying myself while doing so
  

• 8 minor and 3 major releases (from 0.6.5 to 0.9.4), introducing support for features such as audio-only YouTube, embedding playlists, changing player size on the fly and translations in 6 languages (thanks to those six great contributors).
• 48260 downloads
• Main goal for 2012: stabilize and reach the magic 1.0.0 (which will probably include an optimized initialization-mechanism)

• 2 releases
• 336 downloads
• Goals for 2012:
• stop more types of tracking (a.o. by including black- or whitelist filtering of the HTML using the output buffer)
• improve filtering
• integrate (and possibly automate) tracking-detection using the webpagetest.org API
• promote the idea of “DoNotTrack” in general and for WordPress and WP plugins & themes in particular (the plugin is just a means, not an end in itself)

But enough with all the navel-gazing, thanks for b(e)aring with me & have a great 2012 guys & girls!

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Audio-only YouTube embedding with WP YouTube Lyte 0.7
• The bulleted WP YouTube Lyte bulletin
• WP YouTube Lyte 0.8.0 released

I remember reading about this a couple of years ago or so, but forgot as  support for this html5 spec was limited to Chrome (Apple added support in Safari as well). But while investigating a problem a WP DoNotTrack-user was facing, I re-discovered iframe sandboxing (it effectively stopped the javascript-based tracking inside the iframe) and noticed that support for it is to be included in Internet Explorer 10 and that Mozilla is finally working on an implementation as well.

So yeah, the option to sandbox iframe’s pointing to blacklisted (or non-whitelisted) hostnames will probably be in a future version of WP DoNotTrack. Stay tuned!

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Fix iframe-positioning problem with frameMagic.js
• Avoid iframe-scrollbars with squeezeFrame.js
• It’s official: you can not track your visitors

• you can now choose between a blacklist and whitelist-approach (previous version did blacklisting only)
• define what exactly is in that black- or whitelist (previous version came with a hardcoded blacklist)
• option to block javascript-initiated tracking code from being added for all your visitors, or just those that explicitly opted out of tracking in their browser (supported in MS IE9 and Firefox 9, not supported in Google Chrome)
• and off course an option-page under wp-admin to change all these settings

Because of these new features (4 of them) and because I think the plugin is already at least 50% mature, I decided to bump the version from 0.1.0 to 0.5.0. Never been good at math anyway …

If you encounter any problems when installing or configuring this plugin, you might find valuable info in the FAQ. But here’s two tips anyway:

1. In general caching and js-aggregating plugins can interfere, so you might want to disable those while working on your WP DoNotTrack configuration and re-enable (with cleared caches) once you’re satisfied with the result.
2. If you’re running WP YouTube Lyte with the bonus “donottrack” feature activated, you’ll want to deactivate that before installing/ activating WP DoNotTrack. If you don’t do that, you’ll have to turn to the FAQ …

Don’t hesitate to contact me or leave a comment beneath this here little blogpost if you run into problems, if have a feature request or if you just want to chat a little. I just love receiving feedback!

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Coding for the New Year
• It’s official: you can not track your visitors
• Why your WordPress blog needs DoNotTrack

Now, I haven’t met too many people that use Firefox Mobile and indeed when reading about mobile browsers, Firefox is rarely if ever mentioned. But what if I told you that Firefox Mobile is by far the best browser on mobile when taking performance, features and security into consideration?

I won’t beat around the bush, here’s the pretty objective data.

Some remarks:

• the hardware is pretty comparable; all dual-core CPU’s and plenty of RAM.
• higher is better, except for Sunspider which measures time (in microseconds).
• I’ve got no screenshot or URL of the google v8 test results on my phone, but I’ll be glad to reproduce.
• sunspider and v8 are javascript performance benchmarks.
• html5test is an indication for support of “modern” browser features (html5, css3 and much more).
• the features of the browser GUI arent’t measured byhtml5test, but I’m pretty pleased with Firefox Mobile in that respect as well; great tabbed browsing, plugins (including noscript!), sync-ing of all relevant data between desktops & mobile, …
• I added Opera Mobile and Dolphin HD to the list. Opera’s not too shabby but not a winner either?

And last but not least; as Firefox Mobile isn’t native and since it’s on the same (crazy) rapid release cycle as the desktop-version, I consider it to be a lot more secure when compared to the slow evolving, rarely updated native browsers in Android and iOS.

My advice; if you’re an Android-user and you’ve got a recent handset or tablet, you really should consider switching to Firefox Mobile. It’s the best mobile browser no-one is using! Except for you?

From the readme:

WP DoNotTrack stops plugins and themes from adding 3rd party tracking code to your blog to protect your visitor’s privacy. WP DoNotTrack uses (a slightly modified) version of jQuery AOP to catch and inspect elements that are about to be added to the DOM and renders these harmless if the black- or whitelist says so.

The current version is blacklist-based and stops tracking by media6degrees and quantserve. This can easily be changed in the javascript though. Future versions will include a WordPress admin-page to change these settings.

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• Coding for the New Year
• Configure WP DoNotTrack to block what you want
• Why your WordPress blog needs DoNotTrack