lang:en

Blogposts on blog.futtta.be in English (mostly because these posts are republished in a non-Dutch-speaking context).

Music from Our Radioheads: Thom Yorke solo in Zermatt

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Long time no Radiohead here, so let’s fix that shall we? Here’s Thom Yorke solo in Zermatt (Switzerland) playing songs from Radiohead, his solo-records and his new band (The Smile). If anything this is a testament to the great songwriter the man is! Also remarkable; he seems so much more at ease on stage now, maybe having accepted the spotlights which sometimes seemed too much for him to cope with. But then again the period of the great hype has passed and the spotlights now are likely very different from the ones he had to cope with in the nineties? Anyway, what a concert, no? I hope Yorke will perform solo in these parts one of these years!

Thom Yorke at Zermatt Unplugged - Full Multicam - April 9, 2022

Autoptimize 3.1 released

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Autoptimize 3.1 was just released with some new features and some fixes/ improvements:

  • new: HTML sub-option: “minify inline CSS/ JS” (off by default).
  • new: Misc option: permanently allow the “do not run compatibility logic” flag to be removed (which was set for users upgrading from AO 2.9.* to AO 3.0.* as the assumption was things were working anyway).
  • security: improvements to the critical CSS settings page to fix authenticated cross site scripting issues as reported by WPScan Security.
  • bugfix: “defer inline JS” of very large chunks of inline JS could cause server errors (PCRE crash actually) so not deferring if string is more then 200000 characters (filter available).
  • some other minor changes/ improvements/ hooks, see the GitHub commit log

I got some questions about why and how of the “Disable extra compatibility logic?” option, here’s some more info copy/pasted from my answer on the WordPress support forum:

well, back in the 3.0 days the assumption was that for existing and thus confirmed working installations the compatibility logic brought no advantages and *could* cause regressions, hence compatibility was disabled for those (there are no complex/ heavy queries in the compatibility code).

this new option gives users of “older installations” the option to enable compatibility anyway, but as it is only useful in case of problems, I would advice to keep it off unless something is broken and only then to enable it to see if is automatically fixes the issue 🙂

Happy optimizing! 🙂

Eurosong beyond the kitsch

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When watching Eurosong a couple of weeks ago -while having a tapas-like dinner for hours and having great fun- one song stood out for me but I did not really enjoy the arrangements. But then a couple of days ago I heard “Saudade, saudade” (by Maro) in a complete live version and I was almost crying. So Eurosong not only is good for an evening of kitsch, fun and food, now and again it also lets the world get to know a beautiful song;

MARO - saudade, saudade (Live in Avinyó)

Autoptimize troubleshooting howto

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Autoptimize can help improve your site’s performance, but in some cases after installing and activating you might encounter issues with your site. Although frustrating and maybe even scary, these problems can generally be easily resolved by re-configuring Autoptimize and I’ll be happy to share how you can do that.

First off: if the problem is limited to just one (or two) page(s), go to that page’s edit screen and in the “Autoptimize this page” metabox simply disable “optimize this page” and forget about it (or if you want to be more specific you candisable just “optimize JS” or “optimize CSS” or “lazyload images” or …).

If the problem is more widespread, then try to identify what is breaking things by just disabling CSS or JS or HTML or Image optimization (incl. lazyload). Keep in mind you might have to clear your page cache after a configuration change (depending on your setup this might be a page caching plugin or on the server or at host level or at a 3rd party such as Sucuri or Cloudflare).

If the problem goes away by disabling CSS optimization, reactivate it and

  1. If “aggregate CSS” and “also aggregate Inline CSS” are on, first try disabling “also aggregate inline CSS” and if still broken try also disabling “aggregate CSS”
  2. Try adding wp-content/themes to exclude the theme CSS from being optimized
  3. Try adding wp-content/plugins to exclude all plugins CSS from being optimized, if that works you can try narrowing it down further by excluding specific plugins e.g. wp-content/plugins/elementor

If the problem goes away by disabling JS optimization, reactivate it and

  1. Check the browser console for relevant JavaScript errors (see this wordpress.org support article for info on how to do that)
  2. If you see “jQuery is not defined“-errors on the browser console, make sure wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.min.js is not aggregated (add it to the JS optimization exclusion field) or asynced/ deferred in any way.
  3. If “aggregate JS” is active, try switching to “don’t aggregate but defer”, optionally with “also defer inline JS” on as well (in which case you can likely remove at least the default exclusions).
  4. Try adding wp-content/themes to exclude the theme JS from being optimized
  5. Try adding wp-content/plugins to exclude all plugins JS from being optimized, if that works you can try narrowing it down further by excluding specific plugins e.g. wp-content/plugins/elementor (example in screenshot above: koko to exclude all Koko Analytics JS)

Image optimization or lazyload issues can be fixed by excluding the image(s) from those optimizations by either excluding (part) of the image path (e.g. wp-content/uploads/2022/10/whatever.jpg) or if the <img tag has a e.g. class attribute excluding by class-name (e.g. img-fancybox-hidden).

If the problem is with HTML minification, just keep that off, it’s not very important. Obviously, if you have some of the options on the “Extra” tab active, try deactivating them one by one.

If all of the above fails, there is always free quality support offered over on the wordpress.org Autoptimize support forums! 🙂

Autoptimize 3.0 almost done, want to test?

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Work on Autoptimize 3.0 is almost finished and it has some big changes both functionally and technically;

  • fundamental change for new installations: by default Autoptimize will not aggregate JS/ CSS any more (HTTP/2 is ubiquitous and there are other advantages to not aggregating esp. re. inline JS/ CSS and dependencies)
  • new: no API needed any more to create manual critical CSS rules.
  • new: “disable global styles” option on the “Extra” tab.
  • new: compatibility logic for “edit with Elementor”, “revolution slider”, for non-aggregated inline JS requiring jQuery even if not excluded (= auto-exclude of jQuery) and JS-heavy WordPress blocks (Gutenberg)
  • improvement: defer inline now also allowed if inline JS contains nonce or post_id.
  • improvement: settings export/ import on critical CSS tab now takes into account all Autoptimize settings, not just the critical CSS ones.
  • technical improvement: all criticalCSS classes were refactored, removing use of global variables.
  • technical improvement: automated unit tests on Travis-CI for PHP versions 7.2 to 8.1.
  • fix: stop Divi from clearing Autoptimize’s cache which is pretty counter-productive.
  • misc smaller fixes/ improvements, see the GitHub commit log

Obviously given the amount of changes, thorough non-regression tests are required and that’s where you come in; you can download Autoptimize 3 beta from GitHub and install it instead of 2.9.5.1.

As some of the changes (esp. the new defaults for CSS & JS optimization) are only applicable to new installations (so not upgrades from 2.9.x), having that tested would be much appreciated as well 🙂

Looking forward to your feedback people!

peace & love,
frank

Нет войне!

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My work as a developer of free and open source software is an expression of my firm belief in humanity, communication and collaboration. War is the opposite of those beliefs and I strongly support any action that opposes Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As such the protests in Russian cities against the war need to be heard loud and clear and repeated by anyone who believes in dialogue; Нет войне!