Remkus' Rambling Newsletters

Well, as mentioned last week; WordPress 5.8 landed. Feature laden. I like it. Have you upgraded your site yet?

WordPress News 🗞

But, 5.8 wasn’t all that happened!

• I’m not much of a fan of WP Tavern – nothing personal, I’m just not part of the crowd they’re writing for – but they did publish a good article that highlights a lot of the new features introduced in 5.8. Worth the read.
• Tim Nash published a nice and simple plugin that’s perfect for when you need it (Duh!). It’s called WP User Sentry and it sends an email to the email address in a user’s profile each time they log in with the session info. If something looks off, you will know if someone else is logging in as you. Tim’s plugin reminds me a little bit about Email Post Changes.
• At one point I thought one of my side-projects should have its own side-project (yeah, don’t ask), but the time has come to merge those two sites into one. Upon searching for what the smartest way to do that is, I was reminded of WP Merge. Here to make your WordPress database merging easy.
• CSS Units cheat sheet for your next WordPress project!

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Interesting finds 💡

• If you’re selling software, WordPress plugins for example, you may have seen people trying to find nulled versions of your plugin. Florian wrote about how he handled that for one (maybe more?) of his plugins in a thread on Twitter.
• Lemon Squeezy was launched this week. A new contender for selling digital products. Selling digital goods, subscriptions, and software licenses has never been this easy, they say. And given who are involved, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s zero % marketing bullshit.

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What I am reading 📖

Christopher Butler wrote an thought-provoking article about how hiring for skills is mostly bogus. He says, hiring for soft skills is better, and claims hiring for principles is ideal.

I’m curious to see if you agree with him!

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Bonus 🎁

Calvin asked Twitter what the best video editing software was that was “not iMovie” and it seems the agreement has settled on Davinci Resolve being just that.

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the love: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m most active on Twitter and Instagram, but appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.

WordPress 5.8 was released today. I’m curious to learn what your favorite feature is that is adds? Add it as comment to the online version of this newsletter or reply to this newsletter by email. I’d love to learn more you!

WordPress News 🗞

A lot of WordPress related news this week, so let’s just dive in!

• One of my favorite plugins saw yet again a wonderful update in the shape of version BuddyPress 9.0. In this day and age of online censorships tightening up all around us combined with the need to own your data, I still believe this is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal in creating online communities. I’ve been using BuddyPress since it’s very first beta and I’m continuously impressed with the progress it’s making. This release adds about 10 BuddyPress Widget Blocks. All ready for the future!
• Post Status, previously owned by Brian Krogsgard, shared what I think it a fun way to look at a very serious movement happening in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s called Acquisition Tracker and it shows you when what WordPress business was sold to what company. The list is already quite long and I predict it will get a lot longer in the coming times.
• Substack Newsletters is/was all the rage, but what if you wanted to do that in WordPress? What would it take? Chris Wilson explain how to do that here. It should come as no surprise I’m a big fan of the Newsletter Glue component of his stack. Check out Chris’ article and if you haven’t checked it out Newsletter Glue before, now is the time if you’re looking for the sweetest, most simple, most WordPress native way of sending out emails. 10/10 would recommend.
• The Template Editor on WordPress.org is new feature that allows block editor users to edit and create templates that a page or posts uses. Similar to the post editor, this feature allows you to edit and create content using blocks, including a few new theme blocks.
• Roy Sivan prelaunched HonorsWP which is to become a new LMS Community. If you’re building LMS sites, you should check it out!
• I love it when people share their steps as they’re learning new things. Rich Tabor does this frequently and recently shared a new thread on Twitter where he’s taking us by the hand as he learns how to redesign his blog based on the new theme.json introduced in WordPress 5.8.
• Lastly, Christopher John released a nifty plugin called Wayfinder. Use Wayfinder to easily select nested blocks. Wayfinder also lets you know the type of block and its active class names. Like I said, very nifty!

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Interesting finds 💡

• Gridless Design is a website I came across this week that explains from many perspectives how and why you should be wanting to create gridless designs. Lots of valuable information for both developers and designers.
• Center aligning divs. Who hasn’t failed doing exactly that. Here’s two ways that should always work.
• Using the terminal is how I love to get a lot of WordPress things done. For instance using WP CLI. I’m not a fan of OS X’s default terminal and am using iTerm2 as a replacement. But, I’m always on the lookout for other solution. Enter: Warp. Warp is a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal that makes you and your team more productive at code and DevOps.

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What I am reading 📖

• I’m still reading Brave New World after having finished 1984. Next up is still It Can’t Happen Here. That said, I do read a lot online as well, and particularly this very troublesome article stood out. It’s a Washington Post article that discloses how iOS and Android powered phones are hackable with software licensed out by an Israeli company. The software, called Pegasus, is very actively being used by governments and the like. And to be honest, I found the article quite disturbing to read and I suspect you will too.
• My good friend Sebastiaan shared an interesting book with me that I’ve orded soley based on his recommendation. It’s called More Equal Animals: The Subtle Art of True Democracy, and I think you’ll enjoy is as well.

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Bonus 🎁

The bonus for this week is Josh Comeau’s blog about how to learn stuff quickly. And who doesn’t want to know how to do that, right?! Right.

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the love: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m most active on Twitter and Instagram, but appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.

Well hello there! Another Tuesday, another newsletter! How ’bout that?! Turns out, last week’s newsletter didn’t get properly sent out, so today you can have two for the price of one!

This week was kinda quiet, but as always, I managed to run into some things I’d like to share with you.

WordPress News 🗞

Here’s what’s happening in the WordPress Community worth mentioning:

• Nathan and Paul from the wonderful WP Builds podcast asked me to join their WP Weekly podcast yesterday and I must say, I’ve enjoyed being on this episode quite a lot. You can listen to the episode here. One of the topics I mentioned was our stance on sustainability and green hosting over at Servebolt. And as you can image, we have a bit of different, more holistic approach to what sustainable and green hosting should be about.
• Justin Tadlock published an article on how “Contributing to Open Source Is ‘Better Than Any College Degree'”. And I find that a disappointing article to read. I agree that a degree is not a hard requirement to for many dev / code jobs, but this is spreading the message that just contributing to WordPress would be a replacement for education. And that’s just simply not true. Computer Science degrees are not just about learning how to code. Or contribute. There’s so much more to that. I was especially sad to see Matt Mullenweg backing up Justin’s post. But… I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised as one rarely bites that hand that feeds, right? Right. Moving on.
• Nick Diego wrote a cool post about how to disable responsive columns in the block editor. Good read and interesting to see how his approach in CSS works. I like it.

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Interesting finds 💡

Csaba Kissi shared an interesting Twitter thread with a couple of cool browser extension doing various things for people touching frontend (CSS) and development tools. And as a side-note, even though he shares them in the context of Google Chrome, you can totally use them for Brave as well. Your favorite privacy friendly browser that works exactly as Chrome but, you know, with privacy.

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What I am reading 📖

I’ve started and finished reading 1984 again. I’ve now moved on to reading Brave New World again and once I’ve done that, I will read It Can’t Happen Here for the first time. I think you can imagine my reasoning behind it. Would love to learn if you’ve read any of these?

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Bonus 🎁

Saving Capitalism is an interesting documentary I recently watched. It’s essentially about the rise of lobbyists and the power they hold over democracy. I promise you it goes way further than you can possibly imagine.

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the love: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m most active on Twitter and Instagram, but appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.

My word. How fast times flies. This is already the sixth rendition of my newsletter! Can you believe that?! Who knows, this might flow over to me blogging more as well. I know at least Chris Lema would love to see that as I’m so vain 🎶 to think this blog post was aimed at me (based on a Twitter convo we had).

But, we’ll see. Right now I’m quite content with having a flow for writing newsletters and actually publishing them. In fact, let’s dive in!

WordPress News 🗞

To me, I’d say the main WordPress news is the WordPress 5.8 Field Guide. It’s got all the ins and outs that are relevant to you and your users among the many improvements coming in 5.8. And they are bountiful. Published by the wonderful Milana Cap. Go and check it out and be prepared!

• Sometimes it’s the super simple plugins that make you go “Oooh, I didn’t know I needed that one!”. Today’s this feeling was summoned by Rich Tabor’s Markdown Comments. It allows you to add an internal block, so to speak. This internal block allows you to add comments that are only visible in the editor itself. Super handy if there’s multiple people working on content.
• My colleague Thomas published a mega article today about how to speed up WooCommerce. And if you’d like to see a no-bullshit article that actually covers the things that have an impact, do check it out. He also goes into detail on some common misconceptions on “speed improvements” you read all over the internet. Things on that supposedly impact WooCommerce’s performance such as disabling cart fragments and database revisions. Highly recommended to read what the true story is!
• Here’s a block that I know I’m never going to use, but you might. Perhaps. It’s called Sketch, not to be confused with this awesome vector graphics editor for macOS, and it allows you to create a block in the WordPress editor in which you can sketch and draw freely on a canvas with brush strokes that feel natural. It’s released by Automattic, so I guess they saw a need for this for WordPress.com?
• Timezones, we all hate them, right?! Online events make them even more a PITA. Hallway Chats episode 151, featuring Dan Maby and Michelle Ames talks about the ins and outs of running a conference across multiple time zones.

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Interesting finds 💡

Sharing interesting finds with you is one of my favorite things to write about. Today I’d like to share an interesting Twitter thread with you where Feross asks what open source library you have recently discovered that were shockingly good. And I thought you should see it.

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What I am reading 📖

Outraged. Outraged is what I was when I read this article that I’m about to share with you. It’s called Mad Men. Furious Women and it is written by Zoe Scaman. She writes about the misogyny women are enduring in the ad industry (but I suspect it’s not limited to that industry). And it’s downright appalling what women have to endure. Men, if you’re reading this and you see this happen ANYWHERE… I hope, no, I expect you to speak out!

Kev Quirk published an article about online conversations and website engagement. His TL;DR is that receiving emails is way better than having comments. I’m not sure I’m there just yet, but I will say that since I started this newsletter, I’ve received many emails (DMs as well, btw) as a response, a comment to the newsletter. And yes, those are hella fun. Still enjoy comments as well, though.

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Bonus 🎁

Design inspiration. We all need it from time to time. I’m looking to redesign my site and as such love diving into posts and Twitter threads that are loaded with design inspiration. This one fit the bill for this week. If you know of a great design for a personal blog, I’d love to see your recommendations, btw!

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the love: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m most active on Twitter and Instagram, but appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.

WordPress News 🗞

Besides the obvious WordPress 5.8 news, there wasn’t much to mention on WordPress specific stuff, but I did to run into a couple of interesting WordPress related things. But, let’s look at the obvious WordPress 5.8 stuff first. Here are the 3 most important things that were shared:

1. WordPress 5.8 introduces block based widgets.
2. Boss girl Milana wrote about miscellaneous developer focused changes in WordPress 5.8.
3. WordPress 5.8 will introduce theme.json.

Next up are some non-WordPress 5.8 specific highlights I’d like to share with you.

• Highlighting Ross Wintle three times in a row was not part of my game plan for this newsletter, but here we are 😅. Ross released a super interesting browser extension called Turbo Admin. It’s a browser extension that adds a fast-action, OS X Spotlight or Alfred-style command palette to (almost) all of your WordPress sites without the need to install a plugin. And I looove Alfred, so this should be cool. Go ahead and check it out. And someone let Ross know of his hat-trick, m’kay?!
• First is a plugin called Block Editor Colors, which allows you to edit default Gutenberg block editor colors or the ones registered in a theme, as well as add your own colors! Since this is a global site configuration you can much easier go with your brand color scheme, without a need to manually change colors for each block each time. I thought this was quite a nice use-case to have a solution for. Hope you do too!
• The second thing to share is also a plugin by my good friend Ronald Huereca called Highlight and Share. It’s a social sharing plugin that allows you to highlight text and and share amongst several social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.
• Lastly, I saw Alex Standiford released his WordPress plugin course and it contains 6 hours of content with 37 videos. Join him as he helps you make a beer custom post type, customize the Gutenberg editor, create a new block, and create WP-CLI commands to make testing fast and easy. And more! It’s called WP Dev Academy and you should check it out!

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Interesting finds 💡

The following tools are quite the niche, but cover that niche perfectly and as such, I wanted to share them with you:

• If you’ve ever needed a Swiss army-knife of email testing and debugging on your local machine, well, you can now have it. It’s called Helo.
• Being able to share a local site to someone else has always been somewhat of an hassle. If you’re using Local, it comes built in, but if you’re using something else for your local development environment, Expose is a tool you might want to be looking into.
• Ever wanted to monitor content, design or code changes on pages of any site? Check out Visual Ping. It allows you to monitor 2 pages for free per day.
• Last cool tool for the day: Magic CSS. It’s an extension for any Chromium based browser (Brave, Edge or Chrome) that allows you to edit CSS on the go. Aside from saving styles, syntax highlight and autocomplete, it can highlight DOM elements matching the current selector!

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What I am reading 📖

I’ve started reading one of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last decade again. It’s called Who Built The Moon and what its two authors discover is pretty wild. Wild, I tell ya.

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Bonus 🎁

This week’s bonus is actually also a WordPress related link, but it’s not a plugin, service or tool. It’s the soon-to-be-launched WordPress block editor patterns library. Which I know you’re going to love once it’s fully out and about with WordPress 5.8.

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the love: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m most active on Twitter and Instagram, but appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.

ZOMG, I can’t believe the lovely responses and feedback I’ve gotten from all of you on the first couple of newsletters. I love learning how that one tip helped you or how that one link caught your interest. Please keep them coming and do let me know if you have something that could be shared here!

Let’s see what the past week brought us!

WordPress News 🗞

WordPress 5.8 is a month away, but we can already prepare ourselves with what it offers. It’s chock-full and you can read up on it here.

• Hat tip for David Bisset for sharing this super nifty (yes, I am that old) WordPress plugin that allows you to create responsive, interactive, and animated charts right in your favorite Block Editor. It’s called Charts Blocks for Gutenberg and you can find it on Github and WordPress.org.
• Mark Wilkinson shared a tip about being able to distinguish dev environments from production. It’s so simple, but also so effective. Let me know if you’ve done this before!
• A WordPress Wireframe Blocks Kit, wouldn’t that be great if that existed? Yeah, I agree and so did Mike Oliver. The difference between us and Mike Oliver, is that he actually created it. He’s got a collection of over 20 minimal, responsive WordPress block templates you can use to wireframe or jumpstart your next website development project. Built with the free version of GenerateBlocks and the WordPress block editor to be used with any WordPress theme. Thanks Mike!
• We’re staying a bit longer with Mike and GeneratePress, because he’s also created a wonderful course to help you deep dive into how to build lightweight WordPress websites with GeneratePress & GenerateBlocks.

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Interesting finds 💡

• This is about the upcoming iOS15 release from Apple. Though, this update’s impact is not limited to just Apple iPhone users. As Apple is working hard in making its software more and more privacy friendly, it also starts to impact a very different group as well: anyone doing any kind of email marketing on the internet. And that includes newsletters! SRH Design have created a Google Doc that outlines a lot of what’s about to change and what the impact of these changes are. Highly recommended to read that document as the impact is huge!
• Speaking of privacy, here’s a very nice Chrome/Brave/Edge browser extension that strips any privacy unfriendly tracking parameters and more of any URL you click on from anywhere where they’re applied. Yes, really, it will automatically remove tracking elements from URLs to help protect your privacy when browse through the Internet.
• Highlighting Ross Wintle again, but I can’t help myself. The man keeps on sharing cool stuff. This time it’s a tool built around Twitter’s search and it allows you to easily finding that tweet you remember someone shared. It’s called Tweet Finder.

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What I am reading 📖

Synchronicity, an interesting phenomena. I finished the last pages of Civilization One last Saturday and on Sunday I saw Ross Wintle ask some questions about Earth’s 23 hour, 56 minutes and 4 second rotation. And this, and lots more is covered in this book. Highly recommend!

Speaking of Synchronicity, if you’ve never read Joseph Jaworski’s book on that topic, you’re missing a wonderful opportunity to learn on that topic. In the most beautiful way.

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Bonus 🎁

For a number of reasons, I want to stop “voting with my money” towards the Coca-Cola Company’s products. As such, I asked about alternatives to Coke Zero on Twitter. And no, I do not like coffee. In any shape or form.

The responses I got were very helpful and left me with two viable alternatives. Namely:

1. Cáscara, a drink made from the berries from the coffee plant.
2. Club-Mate, a drink especially popular in Germany, but as it turns out, available here (in the Netherlands) as well.

I’ve settled for Cáscara, for now. Number one reason is that my good friend Taeke ordered me a bag and sent it to my home. Thank you, Taeke 😊 ❤️!

So if you’re looking for an alternative to coffee, Coke Zero, Redbull or whatever, have a look at either or any of the suggestion on my Twitter question.

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the love: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m mostly active on Twitter and Instagram (give me a follow!), but I appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.

Another week, another newsletter! I’ve improved my editorial flow quite a bit making it easier to keep this up for you all. I know it was ambitious to do this weekly, but it seems to work so far. I’d appreciate if you’d share this newsletter among your peers and help me grow this newsletter 🙏🏻. Send your friends, your colleagues, your peers to this subscribe page!

WordPress News 🗞

WordPress 5.8 is well underway with the 5.8 Beta 1 being ready for testing. I’m especially excited about the Pattern Library finally being included! What’s your favorite new feature?

• WooCommerce merchants can now list their products across Google. Any WooCommerce store owner now has the ability to easily integrate their product inventory across Google in just a few clicks, and for free. All you need is have you this WooCommerce add-on plugin installed and you’re good to go.
• In my previous newsletter I mentioned ACF being acquired by Delicious Brains, but today I’d like to highlight a super sweet add-on to ACF called ACF Theme Code Pro. Just makes integrating ACF fields into your theme so much easier.
• Another ACF related new item: ACF Extended saw a nice upgrade to their plugin which I’m a big fan of. Maybe you will be too?

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Interesting finds 💡

• The blockchain and its connected crypto coins intrigue me to bits. I’m excited with how that technology stands to solve a lot of problems we see in the world today. One wonderful example is WordProof which allows you to create a timestamp for any type of content you publish on your WordPress (and Drupal now!) site. Another example I saw this week was the ability to use the blockchain for Single Sign-On (SSO). It seems this is accidentally solved by Ethereum. “Sign-In with Ethereum” is, or could be the future of login for every app on the Internet, crypto-related or not. In fact, it’s already the norm for Web3! Check out this Twitter thread for more info.
• Did you know you could apply custom styles to bullet points with CSS?

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What I am reading 📖

I’d like to share an interesting essay I read this week (at least I think we can call this an essay) from my friend Caspar about sustainability. The title, “Sustainability isn’t someone else’s weather” perfectly captures the message and I encourage you to read it because it’s about a lot more than just what you connect to sustainability.

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Bonus 🎁

Not one, but two bonus links for you today!

1. This data about eating behaviour is interesting. It offers a lot of insight into food consumption at the national level. National being United States so that skewed in a particular direction, but interesting information nonetheless!
2. A baby born in 1533 in Dillenburg Castle would become responsible for 90% of color contrast issues on Dutch websites.

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the love: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m most active on Twitter and Instagram, but appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.

Round two! As I tweeted last week, I am humbled and very happy with the extremely positive feedback I’ve received so far on the first newsletter. That, and seeing more than 30 sign up afterwards 😳😄.

Thank you all for reaching out and subscribing 😊. Let’s dive in this week’s ramblings and see what we’ve got.

WordPress News 🗞

Besides the obvious news of ACF being acquired by Delicious Brains and Iconic by Liquid Web, it’s been a relative quiet week. But, I did find some interesting news for you.

• Back in 2010, a Norwegian and two South Africans came to our second WordCamp Netherlands (for which I was the lead) to talk about WooThemes. Well, Adii specifically was going to do the talking, but Magnus and Mark were happy to join him in Utrecht. What we didn’t know then is that WooThemes would in later years rebrand to WooCommerce and ultimately sell their company to Automattic. With that in mind, it was super fun to hear them reminisce on Bob’s podcast. I highly encourage you to listen to it if listening to podcasts is your sort of thing, ofc.
• Speaking of WooCommerce, here’s an interesting project called WooNext. It’s a React WooCommerce theme, built with Next JS, Webpack, Babel, Node, Express, using GraphQL and Apollo Client. If that’s your sort of thing, go check it out.
• UnderStrap, a popular WordPress theme framework, is acquired by Howard Development and Consulting. They explain why here.
• Ben is running a Twitter poll on whether it’s good, bad, or “depends” that we see so many acquisitions in the WordPress ecosphere. Check it out, there’s some interesting comments to that thread as well.
• WordPress 5.8 will add support for WebP. One more step into a more performant WordPress. Still lots of steps to go 🥲.

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Interesting finds 💡

• CSS allows you to do pretty cool things nowadays, but did you know you can do word morphing now? I came across this super interesting Codepen. Very cool thing to be able to do in CSS!
• Have you ever wanted to know the path a drop of water follows as it hits the continental US before it reaches the ocean? Yeah, me too. This is from where I lived in the US to the Gulf of Mexico. Funny!
• Work with marketing in any way shape or form? Then, oh lawdy, do I have a site full of marketing resources for you!
• I recently came across Auth0 and it’s a pretty nifty tool that works with WordPress as well. Auth0 is an easy to implement, adaptable authentication and authorization platform with loads of cool features attached.

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What I am reading 📖

My reading time is still devoured by one book as reading time was limited in the past week. Still recommend it, though: Outliers – The Story of Success.

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Bonus 🎁

Just have one bonus link for you this time around and that’s Thanks for Subscribing. It’s a curated collection, by my buddy Frank Meeuwsen, of newsletters aimed to make your inbox happy again. Now, who doesn’t want that?! #teaminbox0

That’s it for this week’s ramblings. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

One last thing…

Share the ❤️: Forward this newsletter to someone who appreciates WordPress news you’re not seeing somewhere else. 🙏🏻

Let’s connect: I’m most active on Twitter and Instagram, but appreciate a connection on LinkedIn as well.