AOPro 2.3: delay all JavaScript

As of Autoptimize Pro 2.3 there is an option to delay all JavaScript. Delaying can have a bigger positive performance impact then asyncing or deferring because AOPro will only load the delayed JS after a to be defined delay or (better even) only at the moment user interaction (such as swiping/ scrolling or mouse movement) … Read more

Taking over Async JavaScript WordPress plugin

David Clough, author of the Async JavaScript WordPress plugin contacted me on March 5th to ask me if I was interested to take over ownership of his project. Fast-forward to the present; I will release a new version of AsyncJS on March 13th on wordpress.org, which will: integrate all “pro” features (that’s right, free for … Read more

HTML/ Javascript/ multimedia-extranvanganza essay about code

Paul Ford’s “What is Code” on Bloomberg Business is a comprehensive and utterly superb essay/ course/ HTML-javascript-multimedia-extravaganza about IT, computer history, programming languages, development, frameworks, version control, testing, shipping projects and much, much more. The entire text is licenced under Creative Commons (by-nc-nd) and all is up on GitHub to fork or simply admire. Thanks … Read more

(When) should you Try/Catch Javascript?

Autoptimize comes with a “Add try-catch wrapping?”-option, which wraps every aggregated script in a try-catch-block, to avoid an error in one script to block the others. I considered enabling this option by default, as it would prevent JS optimization occasionally breaking sites badly. I discussed this with a number of smart people and searched the … Read more

Autoptimize; JavaScript in head and some deprecated functionality

Autoptimize 1.6.5 got just pushed out, with one new feature and one notification. The new option configures Autoptimize to output the aggregated JavaScript in the head-section instead of at the bottom of the HTML. This can be useful when some of the JavaScript needs to be loaded asap and might prove useful to make jQuery … Read more

Javascript tip: visualizing DOM events

At work we were stumped by a simple link that upon clicking didn’t have the browser request the target page. Our supplier investigated using VisualEvent, a bookmarklet-initiated javasript-tool that goes through a page and visualizes all events on DOM nodes. The developer released VisualEvent 2 a couple of days ago (also on GitHub), which I … Read more

Applying Javascript AOP-magic to stop 3rd party tracking in WordPress

It was always my intention to elaborate on my small donottrack plugin for WordPress, but it was only when Automattic upgraded to the new asynchronous Quantcast code that I was forced to look actually dig in. The new Quantcast-code doesn’t use the old-fashioned document.write, but inserts the javascript asynchronously with an insertBefore on the parent … Read more