I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but I’ll say it again: I’m playing with the format of my content, people! I’m asking myself questions like “what is a newsletter?” and “is it bad to use the word ‘content’?”. There’s no strategy, friends. Last week I included three dozen links at the end of the newsletter. It was way too many links. This week, three links. Maybe. Five max.
I launched a podcast, got locked out of my Apple Podcast account, streamed to YouTube, got punished by YouTube, got frustrated comments from people on YouTube, and I said a few mean things under my breath about Google’s approach to RSS. I promise this is going somewhere.
Oh and along the way, I spoke to a few people. Here’s some good stuff:
New Webmasters Episode ft Felix Arntz of Google
This week I spoke with Felix Arntz, a Senior Software Engineer at Google and core contributor. I had a lot of questions about why Google is paying developers to work on WordPress. When you think about it, it’s wild, but it also makes sense. There’s a synergy between search engines and the open web, almost a symbiotic relationship.
We also talk about the WordPress Performance Lab and how they measure the page speed updates with each new release. Finally, we talk about his “AI Services” repository which provides developers a consistent framework for integrating LLMs into their WP PHP and JavaScript.
It’s a jam-packed episode:
📺 Google, Performance, & AI Services for WordPress ft. Felix Arntz
WordPress 2024 (and 2009?) Recap with Matt Medieros
I’m not on the YouTube thumbnail, or the title, or the description, but I swear I’m in this video. Matt, Mark Szymanski, and I talked about last week’s State of the Word event, but only after watching extremely old footage of Matt Mullenweg speaking at the SotWs in 2009 and 2011.
I wasn’t even in WordPress back then, and heck Mark was still prepubescent. But it was a critical time in WordPress history, the transition from just an open source project to an impressive market share laying the groundwork for a major financial ecosystem. This year will probably mark another pivotal moment in WordPress history, and I can only hope we’ll be here in another fifteen years to talk about it.
📺 A Look Back at WordPress with Matt Medeiros and Mark Szymanski
Links from around the web
- As mentioned, State of the Word happened this week in Japan. Matt Mullenweg gave a vanilla status update. The highlight for many was Matias Ventura’s technical roundup of Gutenberg, including the announcement that breakpoint-based responsive design controls are (supposedly) coming to Gutenberg. The highlight for me was all the love shown to Aki Hamano, a Japanese contributor who helped me through my first decent-sized Gutenberg pull request.
The WP Minute has a great summary. - Are site visitors getting stuck inside your footer with the Memphis blues again? Phil Hoyt released a smooth scroll “Back to Top” block with basic text/icon editing features.
Back to Top Block - Laravel has dropped an official VS Code extension with support for syntax highlighting, auto-completion, and more.
Extension Official Laravel VS Code Extension - Would you use Gutenberg to write your great American novel? I sort of like the idea. This is a pretty basic prototype, but shows the potential of Gutenberg as a standalone writing tool (something that’ll only get more powerful once it has Data Views for multi-doc management). Write Books With the Block Editor
That’s all folks. Expect more experimentation after the holidays.
P.S. If you follow me on YouTube, I kindly request that you also follow my separate channel for the Webmasters interviews.
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