Blogposts on blog.futtta.be in English (mostly because these posts are republished in a non-Dutch-speaking context).
This is how I “Bloom”…in mourning mode. Again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Guess what keeps me alive…
Naima Joris, Facebook
This is not just a cover of a beautiful song (which I consider one of the best ever by Radiohead), this is so full of emotion, so real, so painful. Naima Joris is a great artist!
When I heard this on PBB (I think, but it might have been WorldWide FM as well) I thought it was a nice hat tip to spiritual jazz of the sixties & seventies, but it turns out it’s a cover/ remake of a tune that was originally performed by saxophonist Albert Ayler (mostly known as free-jazz saxophonist and protégé of John Coltrane) and written (and sung) by his partner Mary Maria Parks back in 1969.
Over 20 years have passed since first seeing Magnolia which not only was a beautiful movie, but also a testament to the great songwriter Aimee Mann is. “I see You” is a song from her new album “Queens of the Summer Hotel” and it is just as great!
Just when I was starting to get a good old-fashioned cold I heard this on the radio while in the car. It didn’t stop me from going into hibernation for a couple of days, but man what a great tune!
Autoptimize 2.9 was released earlier today. It features:
This release coincides with my father’s 76th birthday, who continues to be a big inspiration to me. He’s a mechanical engineer who after retirement focused his technical insights, experience and never-ending inquisitiveness on fountain pen design and prototyping, inventing a new bulkfiller mechanism in the process. Search the web for Fountainbel to find out more about him (or read this older blogpost I wrote in Dutch). Love you pops!
I just upped Autoptimize 2.9 beta to version 4, which is likely to be the last version before the official 2.9 release (eta end June/ early July).
Main new features;
You can download the beta from Github (do disable 2.8.x before activating 2.9-beta-4) and you can log any issues/ bugs over at https://github.com/futtta/autoptimize/issues
Looking forward to your feedback!
JavaScript often has to be excluded from being aggregated due to inline JS depending on it. That’s why Autoptimize 2.9 will also have to option to defer inline JS, allowing all JS to be deferred, even that pesky jQuery. As seen in below screenshot exclusions obviously will be honored for both inline and linked JS so you will be able to tweak everything just right.
The settings for JavaScript optimization also have been reshuffled, making “also aggregate inline JS”, “force JS in head” and “try/catch wrapping” sub-options of “Aggregate JS” (so hidden on the screenshot as “aggregate JS” is off), whereas “Defer inline JS” is a sub-option of “Don’t aggregate but defer”.
So we have per post/ page AO settings and we now have “also defer inline JS” for what will become 2.9. And there’s more to come …
I’m in the process of adding a per page/ post option to disable Autoptimization.
In the current state of this work in process one can disable Autoptimize entirely on a post/ page or disable just JS optimization as you can see on the screenshot.
Now my question to you, Autoptimize user, is; what other options of below list _have_ to go in that metabox taking into account the list should be between 3 and 5 items long?
This morning I finally pushed Autoptimize 2.8.2 out of the gates which was a relatively minor release with misc. small improvements/ bugfixes. Only it proved not that minor as it broke some sites after the update, so here’s a quick postmortem.
wp-content/plugins/autoptimize/classes/external/php/ao-minify-html.php missingOne of the improvements was changing the classname of the HTML minifier to avoid W3 Total Cache’s HTML minifier being used. For this purpose not only small changes were made to the HTML minifier code, but the file was also renamed from minify-html.php into ao-minify-html.php. The file itself was present on my local filesystem, but I did *not* svn add it, so it was never propagated to the wordpress.org SVN server, resulting in it not being in the 2.8.2 zip-file causing the PHP Fatal “require(): Failed opening required” errors.
Every svn ci has be proceeded by an svn stat, always. I’ve updated my “go live” procedure to reflect that.
Additionally; I strongly advise against automatic updates for Autoptimize (and I don’t auto-update any plugin myself), not only for major f-ups like mine today, but also because any change to how (auto-)optimization works needs to be tested for regressions. And if you have a site that generates money somehow, you really should have a staging site (which can auto-update) to test updates on before applying on production.
Given the major change in Contact Form 7‘s frontend JavaScript and the problems having to optimize the JS or cache the page after the update, the question I get asked frequently is what alternatives there are to CF7.
So here is a very quick rundown of 3 such alternatives:
My advice; try HTML Forms if you have rather standard contactform-like forms and you’re not looking for something fancy (which CF7 is not either), try Formidable if you need drag & drop form building or if you (will) need more flexibility/ integrations.