Category Archives: 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):


    

        You are using a very old version of PHP (5.2.x or older) which has  serious security and performance issues. Please ask your hoster to provide you with an upgrade path to 5.6 or 7.0','autoptimize'); ?>

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

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.