The Speculative Loading plugin for WordPress is a plugin you should probably try out on your site, especially if you use WP Super Cache or Jetpack Boost to cache things. It uses the new speculation API that Chrome/Edge supports to load pages in the background if you even hover over a link. It will dynamically prefetch or prerender pages before they’re requested by the visitor on your site, which means that the page will show instantly when the visitor actually clicks the link. It doesn’t work in Firefox yet, but it won’t hurt either, as the browser will just ignore […]
WordPress
Gimme all your cache!
Today saw the release of updates to two plugins I work on. The first, unsurprisingly, is WP Super Cache, and it’s a bug fix release. It fixed a PHP8.2 warning, adjusted some labels on the settings page, solved a problem with “late init” and POST requests, and some other changes, but the major news I want to share is not about that plugin at all. I’m on the Jetpack Boost team in Automattic, and for the last month or so, we’ve been working on adding a full-page cache to the plugin! Jetpack Boost is already a pretty remarkable plugin, with […]
WordPress
WordPress at 20
Happy birthday, WordPress! What does that even mean, though? WordPress is the community of people who have built it and contributed to it over the last two decades, and before that, when it was a little known blogging package called b2. So, thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to WordPress over the years. WordPress has given me, and countless others, many opportunities we couldn’t have dreamed of. Just over two years after WordPress was first released, I joined Automattic. Working on two machines, Matt and I started work on the first WordPress.com. Here I am, almost 18 […]
WordPress
Redirecting ?replytocom so bots go home
Earlier this month I noticed that a particular bot that likes to visit my website, “MJ12bot/v1.4.8” seems to be particularly attracted to the “reply to comment” links generated by my blog. Those are links that bots see, but we see the “Reply” button that uses JavaScript to reply to a comment. To be honest, it’s pretty annoying to see a bot constantly fetching those URLs from my website. Earlier this month, it was on a roll and grabbing several dozen at a time. While my server can handle the traffic without any issues, who wants a bot trampling over their […]
WordPress
The Mastodon Onslaught on your blog
You might not be on Mastodon yet, but your blog could get a torrent of traffic from Mastodon, or other Fediverse network if it’s shared there. If your website is mentioned there, it might be the “victim” of an inadvertent denial of service attack, as hundreds or thousands of servers request the URL in the 60 seconds or so afterwards. That is precisely what JWZ blogged about last month when his site was taken down by Mastodon servers. Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on […]
WordPress
How to add your blog to Mastodon
Introduction Before we start, do you know what Mastodon is? It’s sort of like email, where you can send an email from gmail.com to a yahoo.com account, except it looks very like Twitter. This pcmag article is a good introduction to it. Jeff Jarvis wrote a good post too, and Time Magazine interviewed Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon that you should read. This weekend, a probably sizeable chunk of #IrishTwitter migrated to Mastodon. We’re not the only ones. Twitter has been getting more hateful and acting as an echo chamber for lots of horrible people over the years. The […]
WordPress
How to “remember me” on the WordPress login page
If you’re like me: You’re the only one who logs into your WordPress website. You only do it on your computer at home. You lock your computer every time you step away, even when there’s nobody at home. You have a 2FA plugin which adds a new field, and means checking your phone on each login. You might have become annoyed from time to time when you forget to check the “Remember me” checkbox on the login page. You know that you will have to log in again tomorrow or whenever the login session expires, rather than in 2 weeks […]
WordPress
Hide featured image if it’s in the post
I’ve been running a photoblog at inphotos.org since 2005 on WordPress. (And thanks to writing this I noticed it’s 15 years old today!) In that time WordPress has changed dramatically. At first I used Flickr to host my images, but after a short time I hosted the images myself. (Good thing too since Flickr limited free user accounts to 1000 images, so I wrote a script to download the Flickr images I used in posts.) For quite a long time I used the featured image instead of inserting the image into the post content, but then about two years ago […]
WordPress
Crowdsignal Polls in your Block Editor
The Crowdsignal team at Automattic have been quietly working on a new poll block for the last few weeks. We finally made it public today on WordPress.org! We set out with the task of creating a block that would allow the writer to quickly insert a poll in their posts using the block editor. More than that, it had to be simple to use. It also needed to be themed to match the look and feel of the website it would appear on. We’ve created a block that does that. It also records the votes collected on the Crowdsignal website […]
WordPress
WP Super Cache 1.6.9: security update
WP Super Cache is a full page caching plugin for WordPress. Version 1.6.9 has just been released and is a required upgrade for all users as it resolves a security issue in the debug log. The issue can only be exploited if debugging is enabled in the plugin which will not be the case for almost all users. The debug log is usually only enabled temporarily if a site owner is debugging a caching problem and isn’t something that should be left on permanently as it will slow down a site. If there is an existing debug log it will […]