Month: May 2016

Autoptimize Power-Up sneak peek; Critical CSS

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So although I am taking things rather slowly, I am in fact still working on Power-Ups for Autoptimize, focusing on the one most people were asking for; critical CSS. The Critical CSS Power-Up will allow one to add “above the fold”-CSS for specific pages or types of pages.
The first screenshot shows the main screen (as a tab in Autoptimize), listing the pages for which Critical CSS is to be applied:

The second screenshot shows the “edit”-modal (which is almost the same when adding new rules) where you can choose what rule to create (based on URL or on WordPress Conditional Tag), the actual string from the URL or Conditional Tag and a textarea to copy/ paste the critical CSS:
ao_critcss_edit
The next step will be to contact people who already expressed interest in beta-testing Power-Ups, getting feedback from them to improve and hopefully make “Autoptimize Critical Css” available somewhere in Q3 2016 (but no promises, off course).

Quick KeyCDN’s Cache Enabler test

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cache enablerCache Enabler – WordPress Cache is a new page caching kid on the WordPress plugin block by the Switzerland-based KeyCDN. It’s based in part on Cachify (which has a strong user-base in Germany) but seems less complex/ flexible. What makes it unique though, is it that it allows one to serve pages with WEBP images (which are not supported by Safari, MS IE/ Edge or Firefox) instead of JPEG’s to browsers that support WEBP. To be able to do that, you’ll need to also install Optimus, an image optimization plugin that plugs into a freemium service by KeyCDN (you’ll need a premium account to convert to WEBP though).
I did some tests with Cache Enabler and it works great together with Autoptimize out of the box, especially after the latest release (1.1.0) which also hooks into AO’s autoptimize_action_cachepurged action to clear Cache Enabler’s cache if AO’s get purged (to avoid having pages in cache the refer to deleted autoptimized CSS/ JS-files).
Just not sure I agree with this text on the plugin’s settings page;

Avoid […] concatenation of your assets to benefit from parallelism of HTTP/2.

because based on previous tests by smarter people than me concatenation of assets can still make (a lot of) sense, even when on HTTP/2 🙂

The optimism of a pull request

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I was getting old yesterday,with pessimism taking over. But then there’s that Git pull request on your open source project, from an Argentinian developer you don’t know at all. And you discuss the idea and together you build on it, step by step and the merged result is an enrichment not only for your little software-project, but also for you personally. Because it reminds you that too is the web; a place where people collaborate for nothing but the selfless desire to improve things. Thanks for reminding me Pablo!

The end of web utopia?

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Gerry Mc Govern about the echo-chambers of the web and our diminishing attention-span;

They call it the World Wide Web. It may be worldwide in its physical reach, but is it leading to a worldwide culture, or a sense that we are citizens of the world? […] in many countries today […], we see the emergence of a new hyper-tribalism led by populist, strongman, authoritarian figures. It’s like we’re going back to the Nineteenth Century rather than advancing forward into the 21st. […] There are indications that the Web is a web of the like-minded. A Web where we search for what we’re interested in and ignore the rest. […] For a great many, the Web does not expand horizons, or change minds or attitudes. Instead, it reinforces existing attitudes and intentions.

This is a sad realization for those of us whom Stephen Fry described as “early netizens”;

I and millions of other early ‘netizens’ as we embarrassingly called ourselves, joined an online world that seemed to offer an alternative human space, to welcome in a friendly way (the word netiquette was used) all kinds of people with all kinds of views. We were outside the world of power and control. […] So we felt like an alternative culture; we were outsiders.

Pessimism is taking over, I must be getting old.