futtta's blog

I’m not a developer, I’m just a random guy who was lucky enough to be around when the web started to happen, back in the nineties. And over the years I might have learned a bit about web development, but still I’m not a real developer. And yet, there I am with two WordPress plugins, fiddling with PHP and JavaScript. I’ll let you in on what’s not really a secret; I’ve made some ridiculous mistakes while coding those plugins. Trial and error, you know. Testing, fixing, releasing and getting feedback. Especially getting feedback!

Real users telling me it doesn’t work, asking for extra features or making proposals to make it better overall, that what I thrive on. The latest example; JavaScript namespaces. Not being a developer means that I know as much about coding patterns as I know about cows. I just hit the keyboard real hard and hope the browser understands what I throw at it. Until a good friend told me to use JavaScript namespaces, to avoid conflicts with other people’s JavaScript. And a week later someone wrote my software just didn’t work any more and I had to start digging and found a JavaScript conflict that was introduced with a new version of AddThis

And those are the moments one grows, as a developer; you start searching for information about scope, anonymous functions and namespaces. You try, it doesn’t work and you dig some deeper, until you stumble on a great question and answer on Stack Overflow with a link to a very detailed article about JavaScript coding patterns. So you go back into ‘vi’ and start changing the code once again and than all of a sudden you have a working version, which your Polish user confirms fixes the problem and you learned a lot while bugfixing.

So kudo’s to all you guys & girls for the great feedback, you rock! Here’s WP YouTube Lyte version 1.1.3 to thank you.

I finally found some time to continue to work my other WordPress plugin. WP DoNotTrack checks for elements being added to the DOM by JavaScript to stop 3rd party tracking by some of the major plugins or themes.

Version 0.6.0, which I released last week, features a new “forced” option. This mode aims to provide better compatibility with JavaScript-optimizing plugins such as Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache by adding the relevant code only after those optimizers have done their job, using the output buffer. There will probably be a 0.6.1 today or tomorrow, to solve a small problem with mixed HTTP/HTTPS requests on the admin-page while in HTTPS. The output buffer sure is a powerful thing and for version 0.7.0, I’ll build on that to optionally filter the full HTML (with PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser) to stop unwanted requests for images, scripts or iFrames in there.

Do contact me if you found a bug, if you have questions or if you’d like specific feature to be added, I tend to rely heavily on user feedback to improve my plugins! And if you’re happy with how it works, drop by on the WP DoNotTrack-page on wordpress.org to rate it and/ or to confirm it works with your version of WordPress!

Nope, 1.0.0 wasn’t WP YouTube Lytes final destination, the train has left that station to arrive at version 1.1.0 yesterday. Main new features include:

• an updated LYTE-player UI:
• larger display of preview image (background-size:cover instead of contain)
• changed look of title placeholder
• updated controls image
• support for “Infinite Scroll” as proposed by “der Tuxman” and Olivier
• beta-support for YouTube’s JS API as requested by Yun
• annoyance-avoidance: check for “Karma Blocker” addon and warn, based on feedback from Leona
• translation: added Romanian, thanks to Alexander and Web Hosting Geeks

I’ll leave it to Avi Buffalo to show you how the new UI looks like:

And I changed the short description (which features prominently on the wordpress.org plugin page) to better match main features:

High performance YouTube video, playlist and audio-only embeds which don’t slow down your blog and offer optimal accessibility.

Next stop: 1.2.0. Any feature requests?

It was time to put my money where my mouth is, or at least to give the use of a CDN a try. Based on previous tests MaxCDN seemed like a decent, dirt-cheap solution, so that’s what the js, css & images for this blog are served from now.

Setting this up was very easy:

1. log into MaxCDN and set up a pull zone on static-cdn.blog.futtta.be with origin blog.futtta.be
2. create static-cdn.blog.futtta.be in the web interface of my DNS-provider (as a CNAME to the domain-name provided)
3. configure WP Super Cache to use static-cdn.blog.futtta.be instead of the non-cdn static.blog.futtta.be)

The speed difference can be huge, especially when routing to my origin VPS-server in Germany isn’t great. I’m sure my 2 overseas users and Google will approve!

Bandwidth-wise, with 10MB/day, I seem to be far from the 1TB/year I’m allowed, so if you’d like me to setup a (temporary) pull zone for your blog so you can check out if this would work for you then just drop me a line.

I just released the one dot ohhhh dot ohhhhhhhhhh version of WP YouTube Lyte!

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:

AddToAny, one of the most popular sharing-widgets around, has had 3rd party tracking by Media6degrees for quite some time already. I wasn’t too happy about that, but it did have the no_3p option to disable this “functionality”. Half a year ago however AddToAny was acquired by Lockerz.com and it now includes tracking by Lockerz.com which cannot be turned off and does not check for navigator.doNotTrack either.

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!

I pushed out a major new version of WP DoNotTrack to the WordPress plugin repository and major in this case means:

• 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!