rants & raves

blogposts op blog.futtta.be met geklaag en gezaag of met ongegeneerde idolatrie (or; ranting an raving, to be taken with a pinch of salt)

We just joined the club!

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Autoptimize just joined the “1+ million active installs”-club. Crazy!

I’m very happy, thanks everyone for using, thanks for the support-questions & all the great feedback therein and especially thanks to the people who actively contributed and especially-especially to Emilio López (Turl) for creating Autoptimize and handing it over to me back in 2013 and to Tomaš Trkulja who cleaned up al lot of the messy code I added to it and introducing me to PHP codesniffer & Travis CI tests.

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!

(When) Should you update to WordPress 5.0?

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Concerning the very short-notice release-announcement of WordPress 5.0 with Gutenberg for Dec 6th: I’m with Yoast;He has a great “should I update”-checklist and conclusion in this blogpost;

  • Is now the right time to update?
  • Can your site work with Gutenberg?
  • Do you need it?

So our advice boils down to: if you can wait, wait. 

So if you have a busy end-of-year, if you’re not 100% sure your site will work with Gutenburg or if you don’t really need Gutenberg in the first place; wait (while WordPress 5.0 stabilizes with some minor releases).

Nokia and me, reunited at last

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Me and Nokia, we go a long way back; my first mobile phone was a trusty Nokia 3210 and it’s unique gaming proposition Snake.
I switched it for a Nokia 7710 because I was thrilled to be able to go on the Internet. The CSD data transport protocol, WAP and WML were very limited however and the phone crashed regularly (apparently it was the first Nokia with the Series 40 OS and it showed) so that didn’t last too long really.
A couple of years of infidelity later, while half the world went crazy about those iPhone’s and the other half was busy looking very business-like on their Blackberrys, I returned to Nokia for the Symbian-powered Nokia e61i, which I absolutely loved not in the least because of the hardware keyboard (a feature I missed on smartphones years after I bailed on my e61i).
And now I, the prodigal son, after a long string of good, bad and broken smartphones, have finally returned home, buying a 2018 Nokia 6.1 with 64GB internal memory (and 4GB or RAM) for under €300. Great build-quality with a aluminum unibody shell, 5.5 inch screen, fast charging, fingerprint, Zeiss lens … And it is running bloat-less stock Android 8.1 and given the Android One stamp it will receive continuous security updates and 2 years of OS upgrades. After 2 weeks of usage I can say this is the best smartphone I have owned to date! It sure feels good to have come back home 😉

bol.com: please don’t share my data with Facebook

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NoScript remains one of my favorite browser addons (or plugins or whatever they’re called these days). Look what it just proposed to block while browsing bol.com (one of the big online retailers in BE and NL);

So when does GDPR go in effect exactly and will I be able to opt-out of data-sharing from that moment onwards?

No REST for the wicked

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After the PR-beating WordPress took with the massive defacements of non-upgraded WordPress installations, it is time to revisit the point-of-view of the core-team that the REST API should be active for all and that no option should be provided to disable it (as per the decisions not options philosophy). I for one installed the “Disable REST API” plugin.

Autoptimize cache size: the canary in the coal mine

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another-canary-in-a-coal-mineCopy/ pasted straight from a support question on wordpress.org;

Auto-deleting the cache would only solve one problem you’re having (disk space), but there are 2 other problems -which I consider more important- that auto-cleaning can never solve:
1. you will be generating new autoptimized JS very regularly, which slows your site down for users who happen to be the unlucky ones requesting that page
2. a visitor going from page X to page Y will very likely have to request a different autoptimized JS file for page Y instead of using the one from page X from cache, again slowing your site down
So I actually consider the cache-size warning like a canary in the coal mines; if the canary dies, you know there’s a bigger problem.
You don’t (or shouldn’t) really want me to take away the canary! 🙂

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.