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Revising Blog Themes

October 2, 2024 in uncategorised by Matthew Brown

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.

Possible site speed-up feature

April 14, 2024 in wordpress-development by Matthew Brown

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

Stand by for updates

March 28, 2024 in progress by Matthew Brown

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.

A few potential bug fixes and spam defences

March 10, 2024 in bugs by Matthew Brown

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  • Sometimes for no obvious reason the front page goes months out of date (often following spam removal) lasting until new content is added and the cache expires.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.

CSS error on the front page

December 12, 2023 in bugs by Matthew Brown

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

Blog Activity

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    For those of you reading this that are not PHP geeks, a […]

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  • There may be a winding road ahead, but it just got a little shorter with a significant addition of another planned feature – forums.

    The forums, which can be found here currently consist of General Chat only. […]