I have started the process of revising the themes on offer to our bloggers. In particular, I want to remove themes that hide their best features behind a paywall and themes that have not been kept up to date.

I will do my best to make sure there are some fresh new, friendly themes to use. As always, if you have any requests – just ask.

The news is that WordPress released a performance plugin that could offer “Near-Instant Load Times”. Danny pointed this one out to me. It looks good.

WordPress released an official plugin that adds support for a cutting edge technology called speculative loading that can help boost site performance and improve the user experience for site visitors.

WordPress Releases A Performance Plugin For “Near-Instant Load Times”, searchenginejournal.com

I’m considering adding it to Author Buzz. What are your thoughts on that?

The other option is to wait and see if WordPress adds this feature to core after testing.

Please install and test the plugin to provide feedback to inform further improvements before a potential consideration to include such a feature in WordPress core. You can install the plugin by searching “speculative loading” in WP Admin, or via the Performance Lab plugin.

Speculative Loading in WordPress, Felix Arntz, wordpress.org

I’ve got a couple of bits to take care of today.

1. The front page is being naughty and showing old content rather than new.
2. I’m going to update the minimum PHP version.
3. There’s some spam to remove.

Here’s to a smooth update.

Update

1. The front page is working again
2. Nope.
3. Spam removed. I saw some fairly high-quality (possibly manual) spam.

I guess, two out of three ain’t bad.

I’ve been looking into two seemingly unrelated bugs that I now suspect share a root cause.

• Sometimes for no obvious reason the front page goes months out of date (often following spam removal) lasting until new content is added and the cache expires.
• On rare occasions, you see scary-looking JSON (looks like code) instead of a nice web page. This lasts until the cache expires.

This evening, I added some new directives that control cache expiry. In both cases, this is for JSON content which is what the cache shows you when you want to see a post and the cache got confused. This is also how the content for the front page and other parts lazy loads into the page.

In theory, I have solved both but time will tell.

In other news, I blocked a couple of countries that only ever send spam and some (Russian) email hosts. There should be slightly less spam to be seen if it all works out.

Something has gone screwy with the CSS for the front page. I’m already working on fixing it.