The song of 2020: I know the end – Phoebe Bridgers

Phoebe Bridgers was everywhere this year; Better Oblivion Community Center with Conor Oberst, her cover of The Goo Goo Doll’s “Iris” with Maggie Rogers to celebrate Trump’s defeat, but most importantly her solo album with this impressive multi-faceted and deeply touching “I know the end”.

Phoebe Bridgers - I Know the End (Official Video)

About that new autoptimize_filter_imgopt_lazyload_from_nth filter

Some people asked for documentation/ information on that new autoptimize_filter_imgopt_lazyload_from_nth filter which allows one to tell AO not to optimize the first X images found in the HTML, so here is an example code snippet that sees AO not lazyload the first 5 images:
add_filter( 'autoptimize_filter_imgopt_lazyload_from_nth', function(){ return 5; } );
Update: as from AO 2.8.2 this will also be an option on the settings page, see screenshot 🙂
 

Music from our Tube: Black Country, New Road – ‘Science Fair’

A song I Shazammed twice in the last couple of days when hearing it on PBB and which I’ve just now listened to 5 times already as it really is that intense, angry, chaotic, poetic and … well, good? The video is pretty great as well! Black Country, New Road – ‘Science Fair’

Black Country, New Road - 'Science Fair' (Official Video)

Fixed: WordPress 5.6 required Autoptimize settings change

PSA: WordPress 5.6 changes the filename of jQuery core. If you’re using Autoptimize and you have jQuery excluded (which is default) you will want to update your JS optimization exclusion list from js/jquery/jquery.js to js/jquery/jquery.min.js.
Update: Autoptimize 2.8 will automagically fix this, urgently looking for some testers to download https://github.com/futtta/autoptimize/archive/beta.zip (make sure 2.7.8 is disabled when enabling the beta). If all goes well and I get some confirmation the update (which has a lot more then just the fix) will go out today!
Update2: AO28 was released, all is (or should be) OK now 🙂

Gelezen: Witte tanden van Zadie Smith

De verweefde geschiedenis van 3 families in de Londense smeltkroes van de late 20ste eeuw, featuring Jamaicaanse Jehova’s Getuigen, Bengaalse moslims en een handvol lokale dierenrechten-activisten die elk op hun manier in aanvaring komen met hun eigen verleden en met een rationele maar wereldvreemde wetenschapper die aan zijn genetisch gemanipuleerde “Toekomstmuis ™” werkt.
Een beetje John Irving-achtig (dat is een compliment), maar ik werd zelden meegesleept in het verhaal en daardoor waren die 572 pagina’s er misschien 100 of 200 te veel voor mij? Het feit dat Zadie Smith de Jehova’s Getuigen een kruisje liet dragen en over een “kerk” sprak hielpen ook niet, maar dat is uiteindelijk slechts een kleine ergernis van een ex-Getuige.

Santa wrapping up Autoptimize 2.8!

I’m sure you have been good this year so Santa cannot but put a nice ribbon around the next version of Autoptimize, out later this month. These are the most important changes:

  • JavaScript: new option “defer but don’t aggregate” which *might* help with “total blocking time”
  • Images: add field to list images to be excluded from image optimization
  • Critical CSS: major improvements of the job processing mechanism, reducing time spent from up to 1 minute to just a couple of seconds.
  • Critical CSS: under “advanced options” replace “request limit” with “queue processing time limit” (default 30s).
  • Extra | Google Fonts: better parsing of version 2 Google Font URL’s (/css2/).
  • Misc. other minor fixes, see the GitHub commit log

In case you want to give Santa a hand with all that wrapping up, you can always download the Beta version here and take it out for a spin.