I recently bought a drawing tablet (googling “Wacom Intuos Wireless Graphic Drawing Tablet (Medium)” should find it for you), because I had no way I liked to write out visual notes, especially timelines and complex process flows. It was one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time—I wish I’d thought of it five years ago.

I need to A/B test lots of parts of Writers.com, and I’ve been putting it off because I wasn’t sure which tool to use. Third-party SaaS solutions and WordPress plugins both feel to me like they’ll be a bummer to implement.

We use Slack to coordinate our work, and the Slack Notifications by dorzki plugin makes a very handy addition, by allowing us to create Slack alerts based on WordPress events on the WPShout site itself. We currently have it configured to alert the entire team whenever we publish a new post.

I’m always looking for tools that can give me a leg up on design, and I find that choosing a good color palette is one of the hardest and most subjective parts of designing a site.

Our site Writers.com has a lot of 404s stretching back across its long history. As I’ve started to work to clean them up, I flirted with simply 301 redirecting every 404ing link to the homepage. (There are a few plugins that do just that.)

WordPress has a number of lazy loading solutions, but the one I’ve most recently used to improve Writers.com‘s performance on our image-heavy pages is a3 Lazy Load, and I’m very happy with my choice.

Since I found Unsplash in 2018, it’s been my go-to for free, unrestricted stock images of all kinds. However, I’m also very happy to have a backup source of images when Unsplash doesn’t have exactly what I’m looking for. Pexels has been great for that.

The Wordfence Security team has found a security vulnerability in Elegant Themes’s themes Divi and Extra, as well as in the Divi Builder plugin. Elegant Themes writes:

I’ve recently fallen in love with the CSS3 vh property. (vh stands for “viewport-height.”) It lets you make things a certain percentage of the height of your browser window itself—whether that “viewport” is a tablet screen, a phone screen (in portrait or landscape), a laptop, a desktop, a smart fridge(?), or what have you.

I’m working on a WordPress project that needs custom post types, custom fields, custom taxonomies, and custom taxonomy meta. To do this, I installed three entirely separate plugins: CPT UI, Advanced Custom Fields, and a taxonomy metabox solution that I regret using (its code dates back to before WordPress had taxonomy meta, and uses its own custom data structure).