Month: September 2014

Amazed by Autoptimize take-up

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autoptimize at +200K downloads, wow!Less then a year after reaching 100000 downloads, Autoptimize broke the 200000 barrier just last week.
It’s also exiting to see how people are blogging (or tweeting) about it as well;

So yeah, I’m pretty amazed by how well Autoptimize is doing. Thanks for the confidence!

The Broken Smartphone Breakdown

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broken smartphone (http://pixabay.com/en/broken-cell-phone-cellular-72161/)I’m a spoiled, clumsy brat. Spoiled because my (previous) employer hands out yearly vouchers, which I use to buy me a new top-notch smartphone every 2-3 years. And clumsy as I all too often loose of break those expensive gadgets, forcing me to look for cheaper replacements. So here’s the breakdown of my smartphone history;
  1. 2009: HTC Hero: my first smartphone (although I wasn’t complaining about that 2nd hand Nokia e61i). I lost it on the train a year and a half after buying it
  2. 2011: Acer beTouch e110: cheap replacement for the HTC Hero, only used it for a couple of weeks before selling it because it was a horrible excuse of a smartphone.
  3. 2011: HTC Magic: 2nd hand replacement, it was a great little handset once it was flashed with Cyanogenmod. I sold it for my next new phone, the …
  4. 2011: Samsung Galaxy SII: Had a great time with that Sammy, lots of upgrades & tweaks. but I did need to have it repaired within a year of buying it, after it fell out of my pocket when getting off the train.
  5. 2012: Samsung Omnia 7: My first encounter with the Windows Phone Metro interface as a temporary device, while the SII was getting fixed.
  6. 2012: Samsung Galaxy SII: back from repairs and was very happy with it, but a year after that it broke down again.
  7. 2013: HTC Radar: temporary replacement for the SII, Windows Phone again.
  8. 2013: Samsung Galaxy S4: A brand new handset which I dropped approx. a year after buying it. Not really a huge leap forward compared to the SII, but I did love the speed improvements 4G offered.
  9. 2014: Samsung Galaxy Gio: temporary replacement for the broken S4. but despite the fact I got my main apps up and running (incl. Firefox Mobile), the old version of Android (2.3.6), the small screen and a serious lack of memory decided this was not a permanent replacement.
  10. 2014: Google Galaxy Nexus; 2nd hand replacement (bought yesterday, a steal for only €95) with Cyanogenmod 11. Early days, but I just might try not to drop it, I’m loving it already. The only thing I really miss is 4G support, because, after all, I am a spoiled brat.

Septemberigheid uit Japan

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Een mooie zomer, dat moet zo niet persé, zolang september maar prachtig is. En dat is ze in 2014 ook weer, die mooiste maand ter wereld!
De septemberigheids-soundtrack van dit jaar komt uit Japan. Geen idee waar ze over zingen, die jongens en meisjes van Clammbon, maar het gaat over het September-gevoel. Of over de liefde, dat kan ook altijd natuurlijk.

Watch this video on YouTube.

The electric future of single-seat auto racing

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team mahindra in londonI always felt somewhat torn between my love for F1 and my political/ ethical green-leftist point of view, so I was very glad to learn about “Formula E” earlier this year. This new competition focuses entirely on identical (a Dallara chassis and a Mc-Laren engine, next year other constructors will be allowed) electrically-powered single-seat racing cars, competing on street circuits in major cities around the world.
So how will that work out? Won’t the lack of engine noise (you might remember the heated debate about the quieter engines in F1 earlier this year) hamper the “ambiance”? Aren’t those cars way slower then F1 and won’t racing be less spectacular that way?
Well, past weekend the first e-Prix took place in China (Beijing) and it was a great race with lots of close racing, exciting overtaking and one very heavy crash between P1 Nicolas Prost and P2 Nick Heidfeld seconds before the finish with Di Grassi taking a victory he did not really expect any more at P3. You can watch the full race here or, if you have less time, enjoy this fan-made summary;

Formula E Round 1 Beijing ePrix race highlights
Watch this video on YouTube.

We’ll have to wait for over a month for the next race, but I’ll be on the lookout for more electrical racing-excitement!

Music from Our Tube; Flying Lotus + Kendrick Lamar

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I love me some Flying Lotus and it so happens he just released the first track of his forthcoming album “You’re Dead”. The song is called “Never Catch me” and it features Kendrick Lamar in the first part and a friggin’ great bass-synth in the second part (around 2:30).

Flying Lotus - Never Catch Me (Official Audio) ft. Kendrick Lamar
Watch this video on YouTube.

WP SEO vs Autoptimize; who broke your WordPress?

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Autoptimize 1.9 was released yesterday but unfortunately some reports were coming in about JS optimization being broken.  At first I suspected the problem being related to small changes that added semi-colons to individual blocks of script (before being aggregated), but tests with some impacted users showed this was not the case.
The breakthrough came in this thread in Autoptimize’s support forum, where user “grief-of-these-days” confirmed the problem started with the update of WP SEO and specifically the “sitelinks search box“-functionality that was added in WP SEO 1.6. Sitelinks Search Box comes as an inline script of type “application/ld+json”, that contains a name-less JSON-object with “linked data”. Autoptimize detected, aggregated and minimized this name-less object, but that not only defies the sitelinks search box mechanism, but potentially also broke the optimized JS itself. So I updated & enabled WP SEO, confirmed the problem, identified “potentialAction” as unique string to base exclusion on and pushed out 1.9.1 which will now no longer Autoptimize Sitelinks Search Box-code.
So who broke your WordPress today, WP SEO or Autoptmize? Well, WP SEO’s update may have made the bug appear, but based on the fact that json-ld is standardized and as such will probably be also present in other guises, Autoptimize should really just exclude any script of the “application/ld+json”-type from being aggregated & minimized (and not just that of the Sitelinks Search Box). Adding to the to-do-list now!