wp donottrack

Don’t take free & open source for granted; donate to Mozilla!

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Do you ❤️ the free and open web and do you want to ensure a non-profit can continue to play an important role? Do you use Firefox or use MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) to check up on JS or CSS or HTML syntax?
We do too and as from today Optimizing Matters will donate $20 monthly. If you use Autoptimize or Async JavaScript or WP YouTube Lyte then please, pretty please, consider donating at https://donate.mozilla.org too.

Warning WordPress plugin users about their old PHP

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After my initial disbelief about the amount of WordPress installations still on the slow and vulnerable PHP 5.2.17 (or older), I decided to warn users of my plugin with an non-dismissable warning on the plugin’s settings-page (and only there, so it’s not a default WordPress admin notice) cluttering the entire backend):
php52_warning_aoThis is going in AO 2.0.2 (out later today) and will in the future also be added to WP YouTube Lyte and WP DoNotTrack (both of which have a smaller reach).
If you’re a plugin or theme developer and want to warn your users as well (without blocking them), here’s the code I used (do change the translation-domain from “autoptimize” into one that is applicable to your plugin):

<?php if (version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '5.3.0') < 0) { ?>
    <div class="notice-error notice">
        <?php _e('<strong>You are using a very old version of PHP</strong> (5.2.x or older) which has <a href="http://blog.futtta.be/2016/03/15/why-would-you-still-be-on-php-5-2/" target="_blank"> serious security and performance issues</a>. Please ask your hoster to provide you with an upgrade path to 5.6 or 7.0','autoptimize'); ?>
    </div>
<?php } ?>

Crunching 2015’s numbers

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So this was 2015 in numbers:

  1. blog;
  2. OptimizingMattersAvatarMy WordPress plugins:
    • wp-youtube-lyte: pushed out 3 minor and 1 major release, getting 40264 downloads pushing the total to 250545 and having +10000 active installs
    • wp-donottrack: no releases for this one (except for some small readme.txt changes),
      downloaded 2355 times bringing the total to 14364 and +2000 active installs.
    • autoptimize: 2 minor and 1 major release, downloaded 265299 times this year, bringing the total to 506930 and +100000 active installs

That was 2015. For 2016 my main goal is to work on Optimizing Matters.
 

Firefox: how to enable the built-in tracking protection

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Just read an article on BBC News that starts of with the AdBlock Plus team winning another case in a German court (yeay) and ended with a report on how Firefox also has built-in tracking protection which -for now- is off by default and is somewhat hidden. To enable it, just open about:config and set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true. I disabled Ghostery for now, let’s see how how things go from here.

Bye 2014, it was nice knowing ya!

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this used to be an animated gif, click to see itWith 2014 finally behind us, we can start dwelling on that past as of yesterday. These are some of my 2014 facts & figures:
About my blog:

My WordPress plugins:

  • Autoptimize
    • 2 major and 7 minor releases
    • 141324 downloads, bringing the total to 241650
    • answered lots of questions and feedback on the support-forum, allowing me to improve both the code and the FAQ.
    • 2015 will bring Autoptimize 2.0 (fixing the occasional WSOD & the cache-size problem) and Autoptimize Power-Ups (extensions for professional & power-users)
  • WP YouTube Lyte:
    • 2 major and 2 minor releases
    • 36507 downloads, now totalling 210285
    • 2015 will see continued improvements and WP YouTube Lyte Power-Ups (you guessed it, extensions for professional & power-users)
  • WP DoNotTrack:
    • 2 minor releases
    • 4312 downloads, now 12009 total
    • 2015 really should see a 1.0 release, which will finally include CSP-enforced protection.

Bye 2014, it was nice knowing ya, but I’m off enjoying 2015 now!

WP DoNotTrack whitelist & WordPress/ Jetpack stats

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Although the number of pageviews of this blog already decreased from approx. 2100 pageviews per week before mid May to 1300 pv/week after (I never thought I’d ever be hit by a Panda), yesterday was an absolute disaster. Turns out that Automattic changed the domain of the Jetpack stats tracking pixel to pixel.wordpress.com, which WP DoNoTrack (for which I pushed out a small update in May) blocked as that domain was not whitelisted. The downside of white- instead of blacklisting.

Looking at 2013 disappearing fast in the rear view mirror

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rearview mirror by Alvaro on FlickrAnother year behind us, another overview in numbers (as done previously for 2011 and 2012).

On a personal note, 2013 has not been the easiest of years, but our lovely daughter’s “lentefeest” (a non-religious rite of passage for 6-year olds) and our holiday in Italy were great highlights though.

Do not donate to me!

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Some people ask me if they can donate for my software. My answer invariably is they can’t, because I don’t want money. Instead I would like them to make a small donation to a good cause!
Why? Well, I’m a very lucky guy, living in the richest region of one of the richest countries of the world and having a full-time job that allows me and my family to live a comfortable life. Software is “just a hobby” which I hope is a small contribution to make the web (and by extension the world) a slightly better place.
So given that context and given the fact that there are many ways in which the world could be made a better place, I would like to ask you to donate any amount of money you think my little projects are worth to a good cause. Just pick one, click and donate!

  • Donate via GiveDirectly which helps people living in extreme poverty by making unconditional cash transfers to them via mobile phone.
  • Lend via Kiva, or send me a Kiva-voucher and I will lend with that. Kiva allows people to lend money via the Internet to low-income / underserved entrepreneurs and students in 70 countries.
  • Support La Quadrature du Net, which is one of Europe’s leading organizations promoting net neutrality, a positive reform of copyright and the protection of privacy (these guys were instrumental in defeating ACTA).
  • Mary’s Meals provides life-changing meals to some of the world’s poorest children every school day.
  • The Mozilla Foundation is responsible for Firefox and for the Mozilla Developer Network documentation, keeping the web open en other browsers honsest. Donate to them!

And there are many, many more great causes both locally and internationally that can use our help!

Care to share; testing Simple Share Buttons Adder

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A couple of days ago a WP DoNotTrack user asked which WordPress sharing plugin I would recommend instead of privacy-killer “Share Buttons” by Lockerz / AddToAny. I’m not really into those sharing thingies (except for my little own performance-centric experiment maybe), but I nevertheless had a quick look in the Plugin repository and this was my feedback:

Just did a quick test with “Simple Share Buttons Adder“, no tracking there that I can see, cfr. this webpagetest test result (I did disable the custom font in styling->share text to avoid having to fetch a google font).

No tracking and performance isn’t shabby either, but some speed-improvements could be made:

  • By default the plugin includes a Google Font, which slows the page down. Changing this to “inherit from my website” in the “Styling”-settings, improves the performance.
  • Each share service’s image is fetched separately, from a performance point of view it would make sense to use one image sprite instead.
  • You can add a share counter: but without a caching plugin the page load is slowed down significantly, but with a caching plugin the counters aren’t updated any more. ideally the share counter would be empty on page load (i.e. just placeholders in HTML) and after the page has loaded an ajax call would get and set the correct numbers. The “backend” the ajax-call connects with could feature some light caching (5 minutes maybe)?

But all in all a nice sharing plugin, so if you want to have those share buttons, do give Simple Share Buttons Adder a go.