Read to the end to see a very cute fluffy pet… Alien? Tribble? Cryptid? It’s hard to tell…
In today’s edition:
- Hey Boo… Automattic acquires open-source grammar checker named after American novelist Harper Lee.
- 6.7.1 is just like 6.7 but with like, 16 fewer bugs. 🐛🦋🐜🐞
- Deep Dive: Make sure your site can scale up and handle the traffic when you inevitably go viral.
Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?
Grammar? I Hardly Know Her!
If you’re grammer and speling leavs somthing to be desird, your gona be happy to here this.
Automattic have snapped up another company to their portfolio. Harper is an open-source grammar checker for developers, which runs on-device, so it’s pretty private and super fast. It’s named after Harper Lee, of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. (Hemingway was already taken, after all.)
Elijah Potter, the founder of Harper, has also joined the team at Automattic.
That official Automattic announcement boasts that Harper offers corrections in under 20 milliseconds, less than 1% of the time it takes a “certain popular online grammar tool.” (Throwing shade at Grammarly, hey?)
It would be super cool if this was integrated into the WordPress editor as a free grammar checker tool. Remember the days of After The Deadline? But at the moment it looks like it may only be part of their paid services, so we’ll have to see.
Oh, and at the moment Harper claims to only support American English, so it may not do any favors (favours?) for Brits and Canadians trying to spell things like aluminum/aluminium or yoghurt/yogurt.
Code is Music: This is Just Really Cool, You Guys!
Every now and then, a clever person creates something that is just so damn creative that it reminds you of the joy, curiosity and playfulness that got us all into this business in the first place.
A few days ago, freelance developer and Core contributor Aki Hamano shared his creation – Piano Block. It’s been around for a while, but if you haven’t seen it – it’s a custom block plugin that lets you tinkle the ivories of a lil’ virtual piano using your keyboard.
Hamano says it’s for when you get “stuck writing an article” or when you “just want a little distraction.”
It’s pretty irresistible. Here’s developer Justin Tadlock playing a lovely rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”
Nathan Wrigley of WP Builds described it as “profoundly cool” and wrote “Sometimes you see something that makes you put down all-the-things and ponder for a while. This is that!”
Fellow Core contributor Nick Diego called it “one of the most incredible things I have seen in WordPress.”
It’s simple, it’s silly and we love that it doesn’t serve any function, other than to bring a little bit of fun into our lives. 🎹🎶
Waiting to Update Until 6.7.1? We Get It.
If you’re one of those who likes to hold off on updating while you wait for the .1 release: it’s now available.
The minor release features 16 bug fixes throughout Core and the Block Editor.
Word on the street is that updating to 6.7 this time around was not necessarily any buggier than usual. Many users said that the only issues they saw were from plugins that needed updating.
Except for the odd thing of course, like some pretty spooky flagging as malware by Wordfence, a translation issue and this funky image distortion problem. Oops! 😵
Did you get any errors this time around? Let us know in the comments!
There’s one thing we all seem to agree on: It’s always a good idea to install WordPress locally first, so you can try it out without having it affect your live site.
Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats
- Umm… hey… where’s everyone going? The WordPress Contribution Health Dashboards reveal a recent spike in contributors becoming inactive. 👀 (Source)
- Despite it’s slowing growth, WordPress remains the dominant CMS on the web, with 36% market share. (Source)
- As of writing this, 17,446,251 people have downloaded WordPress 6.7. Oh no wait, it went up again. 17,449,063 now. Ah… you get the idea. (Source)
- In his seven-decade career, Sonny Rollins (6.7’s namesake) has recorded more than SIXTY albums. What a legend! (Source)
Deep Dive: The Art Of Handling Traffic Surges Without Crashing 💥
So, your WordPress site just went viral (or you hope it will). The problem? It just can’t handle the heat, and visitors get stuck staring at loading screens or error messages.
If your site crashes, your reputation—and probably your revenue too—takes a nosedive. Scaling WordPress isn’t just a good thing to do; it’s critical for survival. Avoid the crash-and-burn with these foolproof scaling strategies:
Prepare Your Site for Traffic Spikes
- Upgrade Your Hosting Plan: Shared hosting? That ain’t gonna cut it when fame hits. Opt for VPS, cloud hosting, or managed WordPress hosting that offers scalable resources.
- Cache It Like It’s Hot: Plugins like WP Rocket deliver static content faster, cutting down load times.
- Use A CDN: A Content Delivery Network stores and shares your content with visitors from geographically closer servers, making sure your site loads fast whether your visitors are in Tokyo or Topeka.
- Clean That Database: Database looking like a junk drawer? Regularly clean up old revisions, transients, and spam comments. Tools like WP-Optimize make this painless.
- Leverage Lazy Loading: Load images only when they’re needed. It’s not just good for your user experience, it’ll also improve your SEO. Just make sure you do it correctly, or it can inadvertently hide your stuff from Google.
- Pick Streamlined Themes and Plugins: Bloated themes are the fast lane to slow sites. Go minimalist for speed and do your best to make sure your code and markup are clean and well-structured.
With these tips, your site will handle big-time traffic like a pro. No crashes, no drama, just smooth sailing all the way to fame and fortune, baby!
P.S. We should probably mention our Performance Suite here, which has a pretty sexy 123-point CDN, Smush for image optimization and Hummingbird for boosting site speed. Just saying… 😉
Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss
Creeped out by scope creep? Fed up with clients who want champagne services on a beer budget? Laura Elizabeth of Client Portal reveals how paid discovery can help agencies weed out tire-kickers and time wasters.
On the latest episode of the WP Minute podcast, Roger Williams from Kinsta recommends completing at least 50 pieces of content before you worry about analytics and optimization. You’ve gotta find your voice first!
Gender gap? No thank you! 🙅♀️Freemius donated 100% of its revenue from the company’s 10th anniversary fundraising campaign to Girls Who Code.
Attention bug hunters: Bag up to $31k by spotting vulnerabilities during Wordfence’s Bug Bounty Holiday Extravaganza (Until December 9th).
And for all you dark mode girlies… check this out.
Coffee Break Distractions
Can you guess the Owen Wilson movie, just from the “Woowww?”
