Month: March 2019

My Hacker News 15 minutes of fame: the numbers

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So on Feb 25th my Do Not Donate-page was featured on Hacker News and that obviously brought some extra page-views.

Here are some more numbers for that memorable day;

  • Most popular pages:
    1. Do not donate: 10 013
    2. Homepage/ archives: 1 108
    3. about:futtta: 235
  • Referrers:
    1. Hacker News 7 978
    2. Facebook 112
    3. Search Engines 84
  • Outgoing links:
    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanders 959
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_HDI#List 809
    3. https://profiles.wordpress.org/futtta 596
    4. https://www.kiva.org 87

And my server? Even at the busiest time (around 10-11 AM UTC+1) it quietly hummed along with a 0.11 system load 🙂

How to (not) correctly load Gutenberg JS

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On Facebook someone asked me how to do Gutenberg the right way to avoid loading too much JS on the frontend, this is a somewhat better organized version of my answer;
I’m not a Gutenberg specialist (for from it, really) but:

  • the wrong way is adding JS with wp-block/ wp-element and other gutenberg dependencies on init calling wp_enqueue_script,
  • the right way is either hooking into enqueue_block_editor_assets (see https://jasonyingling.me/enqueueing-scripts-and-styles-for-gutenberg-blocks/)
  • or when using init doing wp_register_script and then register_block_type referring to the correct editor_script previously registered (see https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/handbook/designers-developers/developers/tutorials/block-tutorial/writing-your-first-block-type/).

I’ve tried both of these on a “bad” plugin and can confirm both solutions do prevent those needless wp-includes/js/dist/* JS-files from being added on the front-end.

Developers: don’t make Gutenberg go Badass-enberg on my frontend!

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Over the past couple of months, since the release of WordPress 5.0 which includes Gutenberg, the new JavaScript-based block editor, I have seen many sites loading a significant amount of extra JavaScript from wp-includes/js/dist on the frontend due to plugins doing it wrong.
So dear plugin-developer-friends; when adding Gutenberg blocks please differentiate between editor access and visitor access, only enqueue JS/ CSS if needed to display your blocks and when registering for front-end please please frigging please don’t declare wp-blocks, wp-element, … and all of those other editor goodies as dependencies unless your 100% sure this is needed (which will almost never be the case).
The performance optimization crowd will thank you for being considerate and -more likely- will curse you if you are not!

Autoptimize 2.5 almost ready, last call for testers!

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Autoptimize 2.5 is almost ready! It features a new “Images”-tab to house all Image optimization options, including support for lazy-loading images and WebP (the only next-gen image format that really matters, no?);

So download the beta and test lazy-loading and WebP (and all of the other changes) and let me know of any issue you might find!

Music from Our Tube; Better Oblivion Community Center performs “Dylan Thomas”

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Live version of a great new song by a new (super-)band by one not-so-new (Conor Oberst) and (given her age) one newish artist (Phoebe Bridgers). Somewhat reminds me of the alternative rock-scene of the nineties (Hole, Throwing Muses and whatnot) and that is a good thing!

Watch this video on YouTube.