This is an interesting little tidbit for “the web industry” generally, and where it interfaces with real people with non-internet-focused lives and careers. The Wirecutter—the de facto site for time-starved yuppies to quickly find an acceptable-to-great version of a product category (aka, how I buy almost everything)—recommends Wix for those looking to make a website.

There’s been some worthwhile discussion of the WordPress learning curve lately. My “main link” here is the article from Courtney Robertson. Though I’d also point to the one of the topic from Justin Tadlock at WP Tavern. I thought Courtney’s summary rang true:

I’m quite confident a lot of WPShout readers are doing at least a little bit of “client work.” Whatever way you do that—even if you don’t do it using WordPress—problems can crop up. Which is why I really appreciate this little article from Jennifer Bourn.

I share this story from Marc at atthis.link for two reasons: that it is itself interesting and useful, and because I’ve also been using RSS lately and enjoying its respectfulness.

Long time readers will know that I consider myself a CSS outsider. I learned how to do it about 10 years ago, and have just enough skills to get by today. So I read with interest Sacha Greif’s “The State of CSS 2020” document. While I found myself a little annoyed by the document’s “design fanciness” (particularly what I perceive as scrolljacking), the results were quite interesting.

If you’ve been around WordPress for long, you’ve likely heard of a “CDN.” A CDN, or content-delivery network, is one of the most common parts of speeding up a WordPress site, especially for visitors who are far away from where your site is hosted. But the way this works is often a blackbox to people I talk to. That’s where this great article over at web.dev from Katie Hempenius. She explains all the bits of CDNs I already knew, and much more beyond.

As you might have noticed, in WordPress 5.5 you can now tell WordPress itself to keep specific plugins up to do. This is a great feature and one that I’m eager to turn on for more than a few plugins on more than a few sites (that is: all plugins on most of my sites). The security boon of knowing that all the plugins on all yours sites are just always up-to-date outweighs my light concern about one of those sites unexpectedly breaking with a bad update. (That totally happens, but quite rarely in my experience. And usually I can quickly solve the issues.)

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.)

I know that this is a WordPress-focused site. But I also know that programming is as central to WordPress as writing. So I thought I’d share this fun little article that simply and clearly lays out the (classic) “Hello world” program in 30 different programming languages. It’s fun to get a quick sense of how much “boilerplate” each language requires, how it chose to say “show on the screen,” etc. And because of the simple format of the post you’ll not be confused about it. Great job to the post’s author Al Muhimen. 🙂

There are a number of different reasons I wanted to share this article about the programming language “Hack” here on Shout. The first one is just that I found it an interesting and pleasant conversation of the use and benefit of the (poorly named) PHP-like language that arrived in the world when Facebook’s PHP performance bottlenecks started to bother them too much.