In October, Google’s open source AMP project (Accelerated Mobile Pages) will be heading into its third year. The initiative aims to improve performance on the mobile web and currently boasts usage on 25 million domains across publishing, advertising, e-commerce, and business websites. WordPress had a rocky beginning with its official AMP plugin, which was originally…
XWP, Automattic, and Google’s AMP team, has released 0.7 Release Candidate 1 of the AMP for WordPress plugin. Hinted at during AMP Conf 2018 earlier this year, 0.7 is a major release that contains significant new features. This release adds Native AMP support for all of the default widgets, embeds, and commenting. Notifications will be…
In this episode, I’m joined by Alberto Medina, Developer Advocate working with the Web Content Ecosystems Team at Google, and Weston Ruter, CTO of XWP. We have a candid conversation about Google’s AMP Project. We start by learning why the project was created, what its main goal is, and the technology behind it. We also dive into…
WordPress.com now supports seamless integration between Google Photos and the WordPress media library. Users can connect their Google accounts to have access to their photos when inserting an image. Google Photos has gained popularity due to its automatic tagless organization and free, unlimited backup for photos and videos up to 16MP and 1080p HD. In…
Three years ago Google introduced its new reCAPTCHA v2 API, replacing distorted text challenges with a simple “I’m not a robot” checkbox for validating users. This was a welcome improvement over the fuzzy text in a box that frustrated and infuriated real humans. reCAPTCHA v1 is no longer supported as of May 2016 and most…
Google announced that it is retiring its official Adsense plugin, previously known as the Google Publisher plugin. For the past three years it has allowed WordPress users to easily add Adsense ads to their sites, enable mobile-specific ad layouts, and manage ads with a point-and-click interface. “After reviewing the AdSense Plugin for WordPress, we’ve decided…
Online harassment is a hot topic right now, as Twitter’s perennial battle with trolls heats up, forcing the company to develop new features to combat abuse. Technology companies are scrambling to create solutions that will make their communities safer for users and now Google is taking on the challenge of online harassment as part of…
One of the main drawbacks of Google AMP has been brand confusion when viewing and sharing articles. Google launched the AMP project to speed up the mobile web, but in exchange publishers have had to give up control of how their AMP’d content appears. One of the most irksome aspects of interacting with AMP pages…
When Google first launched AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), its open source initiative to speed up the mobile web, the project focused on getting publishers on board. AMP pages were featured in the “Top Stories” carousel and soon adoption of AMP grew beyond news publishers to other industries such as e-commerce, recipe sites, and local listings.…
Nearly two months after Google removed Dennis Cooper’s 14-year-old Blogger site and Gmail account without explanation, the novelist and performance artist has been officially ejected from the platform. According to Cooper, a post he wrote 10 years ago, which he had placed behind an adult content warning due to pornographic material, was flagged by a…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news of the week including, Envato’s 10 year anniversary, Disqus adding support for Akismet, and record growth for the Polyglots team. Near the end of the show, I explain why I decided to take a two-week break from Twitter. I also share the…
Google announced today that it will begin penalizing pages with intrusive interstitials, commonly known as popup ads, beginning in 2017: Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile…
When Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in February 2016, the open source initiative was targeted at improving the experience of the mobile web for publishers. Up until recently, AMP pages were only featured in the “Top Stories” carousel, but adoption of the technology has now spread to other industries such as e-commerce, entertainment, travel,…
Today WordPress.com announced support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Google’s open source project to improve the experience of the mobile web for publishers. When visitors arrive to a WordPress.com site via a mobile search, posts will load faster than ever before. Each post is dynamically generated according to the AMP spec, with /amp/ added to…
Jetpack 3.8 is available for download and includes, Google+ badges, Twitch.TV embed shortcode, improvements to the contact form module, and bug fixes. Users can now display a Google+ Badge widget that shows your Google+ profile, page, or community. You can configure the badge’s width, layout, and choose between a light or dark color scheme. A…