WP Builds Newsletter #4 – Covering The Week Commencing 12th March 2018

This weeks WordPress news:

Stack Overflow Survey Respondents Still Rank WordPress Among the Most Dreadful Platforms
Stack Overflow, a Q&A community for developers, has published the results of its 2018 developer survey. The survey was held between January 8th through the 28th and includes responses from 101,592 software developers from 183 countries across the world. This is nearly twice the amount of responses compared to last year’s survey.

WP Builds Giveaway
So you want to get your hands on one of 3 LIFETIME licenses of Wallace Inline? I think that’s very wise of you! Go and enter the competition.

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Yoast Diversity Fund
This fund pledges a minimum of €25,000 each year. It aims to cover the cost of travel and accommodation for speakers that increase the diversity of speakers at a given conference.

Replace Your SSL/TLS Certs by Symantec, Thawte, VeriSign, Equifax, GeoTrust and RapidSSL
This is a public service announcement and a reminder to site owners. Google’s Chrome browser has already started the process of ending support for Symantec SSL/TLS certificates. This includes companies owned by Symantec including Thawte, Verisign, Equifax, GeoTrust and RapidSSL.

Let’s Encrypt Wildcard Certificates Are Now Available
In July of last year, Let’s Encrypt announced that it would begin issuing Wildcard certificates for free in January of 2018. Although a little late, the organization has announced that Wildcard certificate support is now live. In addition to these certificates, the organization has updated its ACME protocol to version 2.0. ACMEv2 is required for clients that want to use Wildcard certificates.

3 Crypto Mining Plugins for WordPress
Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other cyrptocurrencies are getting a lot of coverage in the media. Plenty of businesses have started accepting them as a form of payment. Some webmasters are also using them to monetize their site. Here are 3 cryptocurrency miners that let you do just that.

TechCrunch Headless Redesign With React + WordPress
This week, TechCrunch launched a redesign in the “form of a single page style React app, decoupled from its WordPress backend.” A pretty cool look at what you can do with WordPress and the REST API. Their post announcing the redesign is definitely an interesting read if you’re into WordPress.

Non WordPress, but useful anyway…

Google Confirms Algorithm Update Occurred Last Week
Google has confirmed that a broad core algorithm update was released last week. This is the type of update that occurs several times per year, Google says, which could bring one or more changes to search results. Google was not specific as to what changes were implemented— it could be anything from changes focused on specific improvements, to broad changes affecting all search results.

Platform power is crushing the web, warns Berners-Lee
On the 29th birthday of the world wide web, its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has sounded a fresh warning about threats to the web as a force for good, adding his voice to growing concerns about big tech’s impact on competition and society. The web’s creator argues that the “powerful weight of a few dominant” tech platforms is having a deleterious impact by concentrating power in the hands of gatekeepers that gain “control over which ideas and opinions are seen and shared”.

Check Out This Google Docs Competitor
My favourite thing about Graphite, the new blockchain-based Google Docs competitor, is that it’s so much faster. Docs used to be the lightweight alternative to MS Word; now it feels similarly slow and bloated. While I still use it for collaborative work, I’ve been leaning toward Apple’s Notes app in all my solo writing; it’s much faster but has some stupid design choices, like a bad default font and bright yellow link text.