Scratching my own itches; my online radio player

I’ve never been into iTunes or Spotify, tuning into online radio-stations instead to satisfy my constant need for musical discovery, excitement and/ or entertainment. For a long time I was an avid KCRW listener, but times change and their eclecticism does not necessarily match mine the way it used to, so over the last couple … Read more

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

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 … Read more

Google PageSpeed Insights updated, new metrics and recommendations!

If you tested your blog’s performance on Google PageSpeed Insights yesterday and do so again today, you might be in for a surprise with a lower score even if not one byte (letter) got changed on your site. The reason: Google updated PageSpeed Insights to Lighthouse 6, which changes the KPI’s (the lab data metrics) … Read more

Developers: don’t make Gutenberg go Badass-enberg on my frontend!

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 … Read more

Another Autoptimize Experiment; Extra’s

So with that nice little page cache experiment concluded, I started working on something that will definitively be included in the next version of Autoptimize; Extra Auto-optimizations! You can read all about it below or you can skip all of that and immediately download the zipfile of the “AO Extra power-up” from the Github repository. … Read more

Reviewing bad reviews when in a bad mood

So now and again people try out Autoptimize in a … clueless manner, see things breaking, deactivating it immediately (no problem up to that point) and posting a bad review. In general I will patiently reply that they can fix almost any issue themselves using the settings-screen and that there’s info in the FAQ and … Read more

About Insanely Stupid Code

When looking into a JS-problem on an Autoptimized site, it turned out missing semi-colons messed things up. Missing semi-colons make JS un-minifyable, as eloquently explained by master-minifier and JS-guru Douglas Crockford in this Bootstrap issue from back in the day; That is insanely stupid code. I am not going to dumb down JSMin for this … Read more