Facebook, Workplace, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down today for roughly six hours due to a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) configuration error. Cloudflare describes BGP as “the postal service of the Internet.” It is responsible for routing Facebook’s traffic and making all of its domains accessible to visitors. At first glance, the outage appeared to be…
Just before the weekend, Google published a caustic statement on Microsoft’s public support of Australia’s new law that forces Google and Facebook to pay publishers for their content. The law requires the companies to negotiate licensing agreements with publishers in order to include news articles in both search and news feeds, including snippets. Last month,…
Jetpack’s highly anticipated 9.0 release has landed, introducing some of the new features the team has previewed over the past week. Users can now publish WordPress posts to Twitter as threads. This new feature is available as part of the Publicize module when you have connected a Twitter account. Posting Twitter threads is a feature…
WordPress contributors are discussing different strategies for responding to Facebook and Instagram dropping unauthenticated oEmbed support on October 24. WordPress will be removing both Facebook and Instagram as oEmbed providers. When a user attempts to embed content by pasting a URL as they have in the past, they may not understand why it no longer works. They…
Honeypot, a tech-focused job platform based in Europe, has produced a documentary that offers a fascinating look at the origins of GraphQL. The 28-minute video explores how quickly the project began to have an impact on the wider tech industry after Facebook publicly released it as an open source project. GraphQL co-founder Nick Schrock, who…
Tantek Çelik, Web Standards Lead at Mozilla and co-founder of IndieWebCamp, delivered an inspirational talk titled “Take Back Your Web” at the most recent beyond tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf, Germany. He opened the presentation with a litany of Facebook’s wrongdoings, taking the world’s largest social network to task for its role in increasing polarization, amplifying…
Last week Automattic published a video titled “A meditation on the open web” that calls out Facebook as the antithesis of the open web: As you get closer the air gets smoggier and you realize it’s a vast metropolis. It’s surrounded by high concrete walls, completely contained. Inside it’s bustling, lots of honking traffic, people…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I review feedback from last week’s show, share a few more memories of Alex Mills, and discuss an article that describes what it’s like to be a content moderator for Facebook. We also share our opinions on the idea of WordPress having shorter release cycles. Stories Discussed: The…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss what’s new in Gutenberg 3.4 and share our recent experiences with the editor. We talk about Facebook’s decision to shut down its API for apps to publish to user’s profiles on their behalf. This leads to a side rant of our user experience with Facebook and…
In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Facebook is tightening its control on third-party applications and will no longer allow apps to post to user profiles. In April, the platform announced sweeping changes to the publish_actions permission, which allowed apps to publish to users’ timeline on their behalf. On August 1st, 2018, the…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I start the show by sharing our thoughts on Mark Zuckberberg’s congressional hearing. We then discuss what’s new in Gutenberg 2.6 and describe our user experience. We let you know what’s in WooCommerce 3.3.5 and discuss what the development team is doing to prepare for GDPR compliance. Stories…
Last week Facebook began rolling out its new Explore feed, which is now available for users globally on both desktop and mobile. The new Explore feed encourages discovery by including posts from people and pages that the user doesn’t follow. Over the weekend, Filip Struhárik, a journalist and editor at Denník N, published data from…
Facebook has announced its intentions to re-license React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. React community members began rallying around a petition to re-license React after the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) added Facebook’s BSD+Patents license to its Category X list of disallowed licenses for Apache PMC members. Facebook’s engineering directors officially denied the…
This evening Matt Mullenweg announced on his blog that WordPress has decided to move away from React due to its BSD + Patents clause licensing. Gutenberg engineers will be rewriting the new editor to use another JavaScript framework and Automattic plans to rewrite Calypso as well: We had a many-thousand word announcement talking about how…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss a new initiative that will help educate users on the benefits of upgrading PHP. We share our thoughts on Facebook denying a request to remove its Patent clause from REACT’s license. We highlight a new onboarding wizard aimed at themes and discuss what Gutenberg means for…