Simon Blackbourn

A screenshot of a Lighthouse website performance test result, showing 97 for performance, 100 for accessibility and 100 for best practices.

Damn, so close...! A perfect score on a new WordPress site launched today thwarted by the cookie consent plugin's annoying JavaScript.

I've been writing PHP for over 20 years but still learning new things. Today's handy discovery is that you can pass multiple variables to isset() and it will return true only if they are all set.

My mum

TIDAL vs Spotify TIDAL vs Spotify: both have great offerings, but which music streaming service is the best one for you? Our showdown will help you decide.

I switched a few months ago. They definitely pay artists more (see the table at www.soundguys.com/tidal-vs-spo...). Overall I'm happy. It's very similar really, nothing substantially better but definitely not worse either. My hearing isn't good enough to appreciate the difference in sound quality!

Thank you for your kind words :)

When I'm not building websites one of my favourite things I do is designing The Dartmoor Collective books and zines. I'm *really* proud of 'Flow'. If you love art / photography / landscapes / poetry and want to support Dartmoor artists, please grab a copy from dartmoorcollective.org/product/flow...

I Deleted My Second Brain Why I Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save

I've been thinking about doing this for a while now. This article might be the catalyst that finally makes me actually do it.

It's both. The choice of CMS (and plugins) can have a massive effect on front-end performance. Kirby is super fast because it's built to be fast, has a built-in caching system, and there's no database. But absolutely yes, a poorly coded theme could easily negate all that.

We have exactly the right amount of hair. Many other men sadly suffer from a medical condition with no known cure that causes constant over-production of head hair, requiring regular costly trips to barbers and expensive cleaning products to treat it, and results in poor aerodynamics when cycling.

All good thanks, hope you are too. I'm not near Plymouth, I live right in the very middle of it - big change from rural Dartmoor 😀

I'm trying Zen again as it has most of Arc's features, just much less intuitive to set up. Hoping it's less buggy than it was a few months back when I last tried it. It's my preferred option being an open source project.

So annoying. I also think Arc is great, it's my main browser and by far the best I've used. The problem is the VC-driven, AI obsessed business model, constantly in search of something that will rake in the billions for them. Personally I'd pay good money for a browser with no AI whatsoever in it.

A screenshot of the pricing page for Scanfully, a WordPress monitoring service.

I can't see the price anywhere on the pricing page?

Screenshot of an uptime monitoring report for Lumpy Lemon hosting showing all servers at 100% uptime.

This is my favourite thing to see on a Monday

This is my approach too, it's worked really well for me for years. I use it in combination with either the command line (an alias that pulls the plugin and the theme and then flushes the caches) or with DeployHQ / DeployBot.

Living life on the edge by deploying to production at 5.25pm on a Friday

I was about to buy it, but then someone gave me a different one for free which they no longer needed

A friend recommended this one to me amzn.eu/d/0Pkuv6m

Just received an invitation to tender for a website build with a budget of "0-£10k". Very tempted to put a section in my proposal outlining what I would offer for £0, consisting of an entirely blank page.

Definitely some truth in that, but I've seen v good PHP devs waste lots of time and write overly complex/redundant code on WordPress projects because they didn't know wp_ functions, the loop, classes, which plugins to use/trust, etc. So a deep knowledge of the platform & ecosystem is essential too.

A screenshot of some of the UI settings available in the Extended CPTs library for WordPress.

Do you know the Extended CPTs library (github.com/johnbillion/...)? I use it on pretty much every site I build. It provides flexible options for the taxonomy UI (as well as many other things).

I'm pretty sure that register_post_type already defaults to false, but register_taxonomy defaults to true? I always set the value on both, but I'm sure plenty of plugins don't, so I'd be extremely wary of changing the defaults for functions that have been around for so long.

Complianz (free for some clients, premium for others)

Autoblue - Easily add Bluesky to your WordPress site Autoblue automatically shares your posts to Bluesky, saving you valuable time and effort and engaging your audience.

Introducing Autoblue, my new WordPress plugin for Bluesky! 🦋

Autoblue will be available for download later this week, and allows you to automatically share your WordPress posts to Bluesky, and display likes and replies from Bluesky on your site.

autoblue.cc

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I always include the name of the person too. E.g. "Support request from Jane Smith [ticket no. 3485]". It stops the threading and is more meaningful/memorable to me than just the ID by itself.

A screenshot of the admin bar from a WordPress site, showing a green item with the words 'Local site'.

I wrote a must-use plugin that checks the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE constant, and adds an admin bar node with the environment name on a bold background colour. Green for local, orange for staging, red for production.