WP Builds Newsletter #80 – Chrome kills Gutenberg, plugin updates, deals and no likes

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 9th September 2019:

WordPress Core

Gutenberg Team Explores the Future of Full-Site Editing with New Prototype

First Look at Twenty Twenty: New WordPress Default Theme based on Chaplin


GoDaddy Pro

Feature plugin proposal: Privacy Data Request Form


Want to get your product or service on our 'viewed quite a lot' Black Friday Page? Fill out the form...

Metaboxes overlap Gutenberg in Chrome 77

Community

Get ready for WordCamp Europe 2020

Carole Olinger joins WP&UP

Nexcess and Liquid Web Partner Together

Richard Best Releases Free Audio and Ebook: “A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL”

Plugins / Themes

Views 3 Beta Allows Building Beautiful Dynamic WordPress Sites

Oxygen goes GPL – scroll right to the bottom

WP Simple Chat – Just another Facebook Chat Plugin For WordPress

A New Era for the Genesis Framework: Recapping the Biggest Changes and How to Work with Them

Restrict Content Pro – Version 3.2 released with Stripe SCA compliance

Elementor – Introducing Background Slideshow & Fancy Dividers

Ultimate Addons for Elementor – Retina Image Widget

Google Releases Native Lazyload Plugin for WordPress

Beaver Team updates

Lifter Elements

Deals from this week

RelayThat – Instantly resize and remix brand assets into agency-level designs

Building Custom Blocks with ACF

Ocean WP – 50% off. Use code: OWP50OFF

Security

Wordfence Weekly September 04 2019 – September 10 2019

Dumb Password Rules Twitter feed

WP Builds

145 – Should we use templates more?

Webinar replay + 25% off Project Huddle

How to use Adobe Spark to create great social media graphics, WordPress featured images and more

Jobs

Gatsby – Staff Software Engineer (WordPress), Open Source Team

rtCamp – WordPress Developer

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links

Uptime Robot – New Feature: Heartbeat Monitoring

Let’s Encrypt makes certs for almost 30% of web domains

The WP Builds podcast is brought to you this week by…

GoDaddy Pro

The home of Managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24/7 support. Bundle that with the Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases! Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.

The WP Builds Deals Page

It’s like Black Friday, but everyday of the year! Search and Filter WordPress Deals! Check out the deals now

Transcript (if available)

These transcripts are created using software, so apologies if there are errors in them.

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Nathan Wrigley: 00:00 Hello there. Good morning and welcome to this. The WP Builds weekly WordPress newsletter. This is number 80 it covers the WordPress news for the week, commencing the 9th of September, 2019 and it was published on Monday the 16th of September, 2019 the usual housekeeping before we begin, if you wouldn't mind going over to WP Builds.com if you're interested in WP Builds, there's a page WP Builds dot com forward slash subscribe, and over there you can join our two mailing lists. The first one is to alert you when we release news episodes like this or the podcast and the Thursday, and the other one is about alerts for WordPress products that have suddenly received a bit of a discount. This might be a good one in the run up to black Friday, so yeah, get yourself signed up to that and we'll send you a plain text, simple to read email. When we hear about an alert.

Nathan Wrigley: 00:50 There's also options on that page to subscribe on your podcast player, so iTunes or Spotify or what have you, and join our Facebook group of nearly 2,300 WordPressers, all imparting seriously nice and friendly word person knowledge each and every day. The other thing I want to draw your attention to is our deals page WP Builds.com forward slash deals and over there you'll find something a little bit like black Friday, everyday, heaps and heaps of products where product owners have reached out to us and given us coupon code. So if you're in the market for something, go check that out. And also WP Builds.com forward slash advertise advertising on the podcast serves two purposes. Well, the first one is that it gets your product or service out in front of a wider audience and also it helps us to keep WP Builds going. One of the companies that have done that is Kinsta.

Nathan Wrigley: 01:38 Are you tired of unreliable or slow hosting? If so, check out Kinsta who takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level, powered by the Google cloud platform. All their plans include PHP seven ssh and 24 seven expert support. Migrate Today for free at Kinsta Dot Com and we do thank them because they do honestly help keep this podcast going. One thing before I get stuck into the news, one final thing is to say that if you like this news, we have a live version today. I will be joined by hopefully Dave Foy, Vito Peleg and Dimi Baitanciuc and we're going to be chatting live about that and you can find [email protected] forward slash live or go into the Facebook group and you'll find it there at 2:00 PM UK time. Okay, let's get stuck into the news. So each week we split our news up into handy little sections and the first section is always WordPress core.

Nathan Wrigley: 02:34 And the first item that I've got for you this week is Sarah Gooding writing in WP Tavern. An Article Entitled Gutenberg Team Explores The future of full site editing with the new prototype. Okay. So this week we had a video released by Mathias Ventura showing what he thinks full site editing might look like in the Gutenberg era. So phase two of Gutenberg is hopefully going to bring about foresight editing and he's released a little video, which Sarah shows in this blog post enables you to do things like change the headers, change the footers, changed the sidebar and anything is either editable on the page or within its own separate area. This is a really interesting concept and now nobody is suggesting including Mathias himself that this is the way it should be done. He is simply trying to propose that this is the way that it could be done.

Nathan Wrigley: 03:26 And he goes into explain how this might be editing areas of the site as custom post types and so on. There's also an option that he can toggle on and off to put a kind of template layout over the top. So by that I mean little blue rectangles appear so that you can easily see where the blocks on the page could reside. And so essentially it feels a little bit like at the beginnings of a page builder, much more simple at the moment. There's also the option to navigate as we've seen in the past in Gutenberg, all of the different blocks on the page and so we'll see how this goes. Obviously the customizer feels like it's going to be on the way out fairly soon. This feels like a great replacement for that. You can edit site-wide components within the page, but certainly if you're interested in how Gutenberg is going in the future of building content on on WordPress, then absolutely go and check this out because it feels like this is a first iteration on the future.

Nathan Wrigley: 04:24 Still on the WP Tavern, we have an article entitled First Look at 2020 new WordPress default theme based on Chaplin. What we spoke about this last week and Anders Noren has been tasked with the idea of getting the new 2020 theme ready, there was speculation whether he was actually going to base it upon a previous theme that he'd built called Chaplin in order to speed up the whole process and it would appear that that is in fact the case. But with a few minor alterations, it does look completely different. It looks very, very tasteful indeed. Some very tasteful fonts. In fact, the font is called Inter and some really nice color choices as well. It's amazing that he's managed to turn this around so quickly. In fact, and if you'd like to test it, go to the WP Tavern article and you'll be able to download it off, get hub and play with it and see what you think, but I think it's shaping up to be a really nice new default theme for WordPress ever since WordPress 4.9 0.6 we've had the ability to have more, have more privacy controls within our WordPress installs and over on make.WordPress.org we have an article entitled Feature Plugin Proposal Privacy Data request form, and the idea of this, it's currently absolutely just simply a proposal.

Nathan Wrigley: 05:40 The idea of this is to have forms where people can request their data to be deleted and so on and so forth. It says in WordPress 4.9 0.6 the ability for an administrator to initiate a data export or data erasure for a user was added by email address. While this provided sites with the tools to be compliance with new laws, site owners are still left with a way to find and to accommodate those requests. Adding a way for users to initiate this requests on their own would prove a more out of the box experience and decrease the burden on site administrators to initiate these requests themselves to obviously WordPress would like to be compliant with the law in all parts of the world. And specifically at the moment I'm thinking of GDPR. And so the intention here is to create a this plugin so that those requests can be submitted and thereby you can claim at least that aspect of your site is in compliance with the law.

Nathan Wrigley: 06:36 And so the intention is to create this plugin and there's a whole list of what the, what the plugin will include, but it's things like PHP functions to generate privacy data, request front end forms, PHP filters to handle form customizations, privacy request, widget, privacy requests, Short Code Privacy request, Gutenberg Block, and a whole bunch of other things like cs s class documentation and so on. So we'll see how this goes. At the moment they're going to leverage an existing plugin, but they're going to change its name so that it's no longer got the words of GDPR in the titles. So get from going to GDPR data request form is going to become privacy data request form and then thereby sort of isolate it from one [inaudible] piece of legislation and make WordPress more compliant. Very nice. I've put this one into WordPress core but I'm not entirely sure it should go.

Nathan Wrigley: 07:28 I actually ran into a bit of a problem editing some sites with Gutenberg this week whereby you would uh, you would load up the the page with the intention of editing it. So you would be there and all of the, the metal boxes or you know, advanced options as they're now called were floating in the middle of the page in Google's chrome browser. Whereas of course they should be beneath the content area. So over on github.com we have something called Meta boxes overlap, Gutenberg and chrome 77. And this is an issue tracking that and it really, it kind of renders the, the browser chrome useless for editing Gutenberg posts. If you're using advanced options, of course you could switch them all off with the tick boxes in the editor itself. But that's a bit of a hassle, especially if you've got quite a few of them looking down there.

Nathan Wrigley: 08:18 So I just thought I'd mentioned that if you are using Gutenberg it probably would be incumbent upon you to just tell your clients that this is a problem and apparently it's perfectly all right if you use Firefox and I'm on a Mac and using safari and certainly everything's working absolutely 100% as expected in safari, but I'll wait to see what happens. Obviously bit of a bit of a crisis if the world's biggest browser by a long way is breaking the world's biggest CMS by a long way, but let's see how this develops over time. The next few articles come under the banner of community and the first one that I've got for you this week is [email protected] camp.org and it's entitled get ready for WordCamp Europe. 2020 still seems like a long way off, but it a, it will approach fast. It's in Porto this year and this page that I'm showing you is simply their page to get you on their subscriber list so you can subscribe to their emails and therefore keep in touch with everything that they're doing.

Nathan Wrigley: 09:18 Nothing more than that. It's just simply a way of saying, you know, I would like to keep updated about what's going on in Porto next year, 2020 but also related to that, so I don't know if I've mentioned this on the news before. I think I have, I, along with a nice chap called Dan, maybe I'm doing a bike ride next year from Berlin to Porto. We're doing it from the venue of last year's WordCamp Europe to the venue of this year's WordCamp Europe and it's a 3000 kilometer bike ride over the Pyrenees through France and Belgium and Germany and Portugal and Spain and so on. And the, it was decided that actually we needed a bit more help with this because this turns out to be a bit of a bit of a, a bit of a thorny thing to organize. So we've taken on somebody called Carol Olinger and so on, uh, WP and ops and blog, you'll find an article entitled Carole Olinger joins WP and open carillon.

Nathan Wrigley: 10:19 JSA is a very well known face within the WordPress and word camp community and hopefully she's going to be getting us all in all in order for our ride next year. I'm going to deal with this next one incredibly briefly. It is over on the liquid web.com blog. It's entitled Nexess and Liquid Web partner together. Um, and it is just to say that liquid web, which is a managed hosting platform and nexus and managed web host provider for ecommerce platforms have joined forces. Apparently they've got 50 years of combined hosting experience. There's nothing much more for me to say than that. Apart from, you know, the obvious coalescence of of things in the WordPress space, things seem to be getting bigger and bigger all the time. But if you're using either of those platforms, it might be intriguing for you to go and see how this will affect you.

Nathan Wrigley: 11:06 They make the point to that. The companies will operate largely separately, but obviously only time will tell. We don't often talk about freebies on this news episode, but today we are because on WP Tavern we have an article entitled Richard Best Releases, free audio and Ebook, a practical guide to WordPress and the GPL. Obviously if you are using WordPress you probably should know a little bit about the ins and the outs of the GPL, the the license under which it operates. And this is now a free ebook and a free audio book explaining all about it. Apparently this used to be available for sale, but he's decided he's now going to release it and there's still an awful lot of content in there. So if you are modifying WordPress core, it might be interesting for you to know what what it is that you can do.

Nathan Wrigley: 11:52 If a theme developer or plugin developer you, it would be good to know what it is that you ought to be doing. And also if you're just somebody that purchases plugins and themes and things like that, it'd be good to know where you can deploy those in what, what the license actually represents. So go check that out. Nice Freebie. Very nice indeed. Thank you very much Richard Best. The next section that we always have is to do with plugins and themes and they saw it. We've got an absolute ton of news about both of those things. So let's get stuck into that. First one is over on the toolset.com website and it's called views three beta and I was building beautiful dynamic WordPress sites. Well this is to say that they have the guys over at Toolset have a views, beta, which allows you to do absolutely loads of the functionality that used to be achieved inside their plugin settings panel if you like.

Nathan Wrigley: 12:44 Now it can, a lot of it has been shifted over into the block editor. So for example, um, well one of the things I would recommend is go and watch the video. It's about four and a half minutes long and it explains how all of this works. But you can create now views directly from the block editor. That is to say that you can manually set up views within the block editor. They've got their little wizard that you can walk through. You can also create some custom searches in there. So faceted, excuse me, filtering. You can add sorting controls, you can add pagination controls, you can display blocks when certain conditions are met as well. And you can also style these blocks using a container block to hold them all into you. You know, you alter the styling of one and it amends. Um, all of the similar similar setup.

Nathan Wrigley: 13:30 You can also add dynamic map markers and easily change the topography options. In other words, you can now achieve an absolute ton within the Gutenberg editor. So this is brilliant. I'm certainly going to explore this and may even put a video together about it. Last week we talked about oxygen and the fact that it had updated to version 3.0 while a little chestnut that we kind of missed was that along with updating to 3.0 they've also updated their licensing model. As I spoke about earlier, the GPL, they have become 100% open source and licensed under the terms of the GPL version two. There's not a lot more to say to it than that but it's just a really nice and interesting development. Um, and obviously if those concerns were holding you back, maybe this is a development which you're welcome and maybe explore oxygen further. It seems like just about every site you go to these days has some kind of chat capability nestled in the bottom right hand corner.

Nathan Wrigley: 14:31 Maybe this is something that you've implemented for clients, but it's certainly a popular way of using chat is to connect it to Facebook and Messenger. Cause just about everybody seems to be logged into Facebook all the time. And today on the WP simple chat.com website you can find instructions for how to use their free live chat plugin for WordPress. I've not come across this before, not entirely sure whether it's brand new or whether I've just come across it, but basically four steps including installing it, configuring it with your Facebook id and that's more or less it logging into WordPress. And setting it up and so on. Interestingly, it's actually been put together by the guys over at groundhog. You have a plug in that uh, enables you to send out email marketing campaigns. But yeah, what a nice thing to offer the community. So there you go.

Nathan Wrigley: 15:20 Free, simple, easy to use. Should have you set up and running with some Facebook messenger chat within a couple of minutes. It's about a year now since studio press, the owners of Genesis, the genesis framework were taken under the auspices of WP engine and Carrie Dils this week has launched an article entitled a New Era for the genesis framework, recapping the biggest changes and how to work with them. And so what she's done basically is to say, okay, let's see what's happened in the last year. And she's got a nice medium to long article where she goes over these, she talks about theme onboarding, how to integrate it with Gutenberg, you know, the block editor, genesis and accelerated mobile pages, custom loop with query arguments on any page template files in the root directory, how to customize the credit's text and toggling on and off breadcrumbs, the title or featured images. So basically if you haven't revisited, um, genesis for a little while, maybe it's time go and see what Carrie has to say about those updates.

Nathan Wrigley: 16:21 Thanks for keeping US updated. I on Carrie, there seems to be a slew of stuff coming into my inbox in the moment about payments being s c a compliant. So, um, I've had ones from all sorts of LMS platforms and so essentially if you're in any way, shape or form connected with taking money on the Internet, this might be something that you need to look at. I've simply picked one out of the hat and it was restrict content pro. They out their article version 3.2 released with stripe SCA compliance and it explains about what that feature is and how it works and why you need to use it. But what I would say is no matter what payment service you're using, it would be good to go and check that they were becoming sc a compliant so that you are, you know, doing everything as you should be doing.

Nathan Wrigley: 17:11 Elementor, the popular page builder, Scott, something to announce this week on a post entitled introducing background slideshows and Fancy dividers. So two things really. Number one, you can now add background sliders so you don't have to have a slider plugin. You can do image backgrounds, video backgrounds, gradient backgrounds. You can have things like Ken Burns effects and you know, choose the transition type, whether it's a fade or swipe or what have you. And so you can basically overlay this over any content that you like and things will occur in the background. You can also add a Vimeo. It was one of the choices or self hosted videos. So that's quite a nice update. And also the capability to play things on mobile should the device be configured to support it. And also they've added divider widgets, or at least they've improved their divider widgets. So instead of just being sort of like a straight line HR tag, now you've got the option to are things like curvy lines and Christmas trees and all sorts and add icons and texts within them.

Nathan Wrigley: 18:09 And Yeah, nice little feature update there from Elementor. Speaking of Elementor, many of you may have invested in some sort of additional capabilities to build on top of Elementor and one of them is ultimate ad-ons for Elementor, adding absolutely heaps of modules into Elementor. And today we hear from them, they've got the retina image widget and it says worried about your image quality affecting user experience on high definition screens. The Retina Image widget lets you display crisp and clear images on retina devices with ease. So essentially you get the option to add a normal image and then a retina image. You can do the same with logos and so on. So a nice little bump from the guys at Ultimate Addons for Elementor for I'm kind of sure that I covered something stability this a few weeks ago, but not from the same angle. This is all about the fact that Google is going to be natively capable of lazy loading images and the WP Tavern have an article entitled Google Releases, Native Lazy Load Plugin for WordPress.

Nathan Wrigley: 19:10 So as I say in the future, this will all be handled within the browser, but for now, um, WordPress doesn't have the core implementation of this. That is to say it isn't in core, it's still on discussion. I'm sure it will go in at some point because of Google's might with its chrome browser, but for now Google have kind of decided to bridge that gap and they've got the native lazy load plugin. It was created by a Google engineer, Felix Arndt and it's available right now for you to download from the repo. So if you want to take advantage of that, I presume that this plugin will have a limited shelf life that you might like to get that going on right away. Different page builder. Now this time, beaver builder, well not beaver builder specifically, but be the team who create additional capabilities within the beaver builder plugin.

Nathan Wrigley: 19:57 They have this week announced that they're going to be supporting zed index. Somebody had to do it, they say so they've built the capability for you to add zed index or z index as I'm sure you'll say in North America so that you can put things above and below one another. They've also updated their sticky columns module and they've also had updates to their AEB split testing platform, which is all native within beaver builder and a few other things. So go and check it out. I've actually had to create an Evernote, um, documents so that you can read this because there was no option to view it in the browser. So I contacted Tom from beaver team and he's added that capability for all meat emails from now on. So thank you Tom. This is an interesting one that I caught sight of this week. It's called lifter elements.

Nathan Wrigley: 20:44 And if you are using the lifter LMS learning management system platform, I am, you've happened to be using the element or page builder. Well they've got this new capability. If you download their plugin, got the the capability to alter all of the visual elements of the LMS platform using the power of the Elementor interface. So go and check the video out to to see what I'm really talking about. But basically you can adapt to the way that your LMS looks like and that might be important to you. You know, you can create something which is a little bit different from everybody else's and maybe you know, enlarge or the videos or move things around, position things and change colors and so on. But also quite interestingly, if you go over to this website and then click on the or how hover over the products link at the top right hand side.

Nathan Wrigley: 21:31 Um, you'll see that this company, which I believe is called tangible, has have got similar products. For example, beaver builder and Learndash, they've got beaver Dash, um, they've gotten member dash. I've got something called learn dash materials extended and various other things. So I just thought that was worth mentioning. If you're in the LMS space, there seems to be a company that are honing down on that too. The ability to customize your membership platforms and your LMS platforms using page builders. So yeah, really, really interesting. Got a new section this week called deals of the week and essentially I'm going to start putting in here some deals that I come across probably where I put them all in, but I'll put some ones that I believe are worthy of attention. And this week I've got something on appsumo actually it's called relay that now this is for creating um, repeatable, repeatable and customizable versions of things like featured images.

Nathan Wrigley: 22:25 So you set it up one, set your colors, set your fonts and all of that kind of stuff. And then next time you want to create a featured image, then you just log in and edit to text and you don't even have to do it on the image itself. You can just do it in a little sort of feel that the right hand side. And I use it for podcast episode featured images and things like that, and it really saves me time. It's available for $49 at the moment. Also, um, Java script for WordPress, which is Zach Gordon's course. They have got a bit of a sale. They've got this other anciliary course called building custom blocks with ACF. So this is about building your own custom blocks and they've reduced the price. I don't know how long this will be, four, but from $79 to $49.

Nathan Wrigley: 23:08 So maybe worth a look at. And also ocean WP, you have an offer on at the moment, uh, I think it runs out in a few days time, but essentially if you click on the link and then use the offer code, which we'll find in the show notes, you'll be able to get 50% off. So that's a really great discount. So three offers for you this week. If you want to include any offers that you've got going on, feel free to contact me. I can put things on our deals page, but also I can include them in the news like this, a very light touch on security. I don't really feel that this newsletter can do the security issues of the week much justice. So here we go very quickly wordfence I've got an article wordfence weekly, September the fourth to September the 10th and they list out all of the common threats that they found this week.

Nathan Wrigley: 23:53 So you know, if you're into Internet security, go and check out that sort of stuff. It's mainly to do with WordPress 5.2 0.2 and cross site scripting problems. And then also I came across this, which is nothing to do with security at all except that it kind of tangentially is, it's a Twitter feed called dumb password rules and whoever is running this is just right. Got My sense of humor down pat. Um, he goes out and he finds ridiculous security postures from companies who make you do things like fill out a password field and they'll only accept it if it's got eight characters and various things like that. So just go check it out. It's probably completely disposable. You'll look at it once, but I just thought it was quite funny. Forgive me, the blatantly self-promotional part of the news bulletin. We did three things of note to this week.

Nathan Wrigley: 24:47 We released a podcast episode called should we use templates more and in this episode David Walmsley and I discuss exactly this. Should we be creating everything from the ground up every time? Should we be making completely bespoke unique websites for our clients or should we be templating things? Perhaps using other people's purchase templates or maybe creating a template templates library of our own so that we can in fact say they're unique and bespoke, but we haven't, you know, we haven't designed it uniquely specifically for your website, but we definitely made it ourselves or you know, just where is this whole thing going? Are we going to be going down the route of page builders and templates, which it kind of feels like is the, is the current direction of travel. We also had a podcast episode with Andre Gagnon from project huddle. It was very well received.

Nathan Wrigley: 25:36 There's an awful lot of people who turned up and asked some very good questions. It's about an hour and a half long or hour and 20 minutes and he really does drill down and explain everything that you can do with project ADL, including a few things that it would appear hardly anybody knew about. He's also, if you go to that page off a 25% off, that runs out on the 20th of September, 2019 but the code is on the page. You can go and check it out, get 25% off project huddle and you know, learn all about how it works from the founder himself and also a recorded a contribute episode, which is an episode in which I get somebody from our community to just come on and Natta with me about something that they've done. And in this week we talked to Paul Chris about how he uses Adobe spark to create social media graphics for his WordPress posts.

Nathan Wrigley: 26:22 And it's very interesting seeing what it's capable of seeing what feature sets in that very short, suddenly about 10 15 minutes or so. So maybe checking that one out as well. Another new section that I've thrown in this week and I'm hoping to grow each week as the job section. So if I come across some jobs on the Internet in the WordPress space, I'm going to include them in here. Please feel free to reach out to me if you're offering a genuine certified actual job. So here we go. The Gatsby project is hiring a staff software engineer for WordPress. So cloned. Click on the notes and you'll be able to access that page. And also our t camp are hiring a WordPress developer. It's a remote to working positions, so that might suit you down to the ground. So there's only those two. I'm not going to go into the details, but if you know, if you're in the market for a job and you need some employment, maybe go and check those out.

Nathan Wrigley: 27:11 But like I say, please contact me if you would like to list your own jobs. That's all of the specific word Presi stuff I've got this week. But as always we've round off with a section entitled not to WordPress, but useful anyway. This one certainly is really useful. It's over on the Google wet webmaster central blogging titled Evolving. No follow new ways to identify the nature of links and the no follow attribute was apparently invented 15 years ago and it was obviously a very good way of hiking harm, fighting, things like comments spam, but the web has evolved. The way that we're using the web has evolved and so they've decided to add some more. So now you've got the capability to add these. You can do rel equals in and then in quotation marks sponsored use the sponsored attribute to identify links on the site that were generated as part of an advertisement sponsorship or other compensation arrangements or agreements.

Nathan Wrigley: 28:07 Rel Equals U G C stands for user generated content and the user generated content attribute value is recommended for links within user generated content such as comments and forum posts. And I suppose this is quite interesting in that you can disassociate your website from these but still have it as part of the website and then you can keep using no follow as well. And that attribute is for cases where you want the link to a page but don't want to imply any type of endorsement including passing along ranking credit to other pages. So yeah, I think we all need to get to grips with this one. So go read that blog post. I don't know about you, but I like to make sure that my websites are up and running and one of the ways that I've used in the past is to use a service called uptime robot.

Nathan Wrigley: 28:51 Uptime robot pings your server and just checks to see if there's life over there. And if not, they send you a little warning and you can link it up with services such as main WP and so on, and get email alerts. Well, they've decided that they want to expand what they're doing and now this is not available in the free plan, which is extremely generous. Think it's 50 free sites. They're adding this into their pro plan. And what they're saying is there's probably a whole lot of infrastructure maybe in your company or what have you, that is not publicly available on the Internet. But nevertheless, it's critical that this stuff is still up. So that might be a server in an office or a computer or or indeed any device. So this works in the opposite direction rather than uptime robot pinging your server. The idea here is that you install something on this server and it pings uptime robot.

Nathan Wrigley: 29:38 So it's not ingress, it's eagerness there, your your server or what have you has to keep pinging at regular points. And as soon as uptime robot detects that, oh it's stopped. It's no longer pinging us anymore than they will alert you that this service or whatever it might be has gone down. So yeah, I can see this being extremely useful in an awful lot of cases where stuff behind the firewall or within the office is not available on the Internet. Cast your mind back just a couple of years and quite a lot of the Internet was on an unencrypted connection because it was expensive. You had to buy certificates and go through the due diligence of acquiring them. And then along came this fabulous technology, let's encrypt, which although it can be abused, is significantly better than what we have before. And it turns out that now let's encrypt, make certificates for almost 30% of web domains.

Nathan Wrigley: 30:31 You can find out about this on the Leo bottomon, dot com websites where he's got an article entitled exactly what I just said. Let's encrypt make search for almost 30% of web domains. I'm so glad this service came along. Um, it's utterly brilliant, utterly free. And like I said, although it's not absolutely bulletproof, it's a lot better than what we have before. Let's encrypt clocks in at 47.2 million with Digi certain second place, 28.9 million followed by Comodo, Google, and a whole bunch of others going down below. So yeah, there we go. Fascinating stuff. That is all the news I've got for you this week. That being said, it's not everything I've got to say because I need to thank our sponsor for this week's WP Builds newsletter, which is Kinsta. Kinsta take managed WordPress hosting to the next level, powered by the Google cloud platform.

Nathan Wrigley: 31:23 Your site is secured like Fort Knox and runs on speed obsessive architecture. You can access to the latest software and developer tools such as PHP seven ssh and staging environments and the best part are expert team of WordPress engineers are available 24 seven should you need help and you can migrate today for free at Kinsta dot com okay. Perhaps we will see you on Thursday for the podcast. Perhaps we'll see you back here next Monday for the weekly WordPress news for next week's WordPress news or maybe we'll see you a little bit later today. If you're listening to this on Monday for our live episode WP Builds dot com forward slash live or do you want to see in our Facebook group, but that's it for this week. I hope you got something out of it. Please let me know. I got some email this week because I asked this exact same question last week. Is this pitched at the right level? Is it too long? Is it too short? Do I, do I have the right content? And thankfully, so far the answer appears to be yes, but I'm always keen to hear from more people about that. So thanks to those who emailed and right. See you next week. Bye Bye for now.

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Nathan Wrigley
Nathan Wrigley

Nathan writes posts and creates audio about WordPress on WP Builds and WP Tavern. He can also be found in the WP Builds Facebook group, and on Mastodon at wpbuilds.social. Feel free to donate to WP Builds to keep the lights on as well!

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