In July 2020, Bing released its first official plugin for WordPress that allowed site owners to submit URLS and get their content indexed immediately, instead of waiting for the search engine to crawl the site. The IndexNow API, which debuted in October 2021, is the next evolution of the Bing URL submissions API, created by…
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,…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Gary Pendergast, a WordPress core contributor, to discuss what’s new with Gutenberg. We find out what happened with WordPress 4.9.6, and discuss WordPress’ future. We also discuss Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub and when WordPress core development might transition to GitHub. Last but not least, we…
When uploading images to WordPress’ media library, there are a couple of different fields available to provide additional information. You can edit an image’s title, add a caption, provide alternative text, and add a description. The Alt Text field displays text when an image does not display. According to Morten Rand-Hendriksen, these fields are underutilized and largely ignored. There are two…
Budding Windows App Studio developers who want an easy way to create a Windows application of their WordPress sites are in luck. In the December update, the Windows App Team announced a couple of new features including, a WordPress data source and template. Windows App Studio is a template-driven, drag-and-drop software development tool that enables…
For years, Microsoft and open source have rarely been used in the same sentence. With new leadership, the company has made major strides in becoming part of the open source movement. Late last year, the company announced its .NET server stack would be open source, enabling .NET to become a cross-platform framework. The company has…
In this weeks edition of WordPress Weekly, we discussed several topics with WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin. Ever since the release of WordPress 3.7, many have questioned why auto updates are turned on by default for minor and security updates. Nacin described the philosophy behind the auto update system and why the team will be…
Founded in 2006, Qik enabled mobile phone users to share live video with their friends, family and followers. In January of 2011, the company was acquired by Skype. Three years after announcing the acquisition, the company has announced they will shutdown the service on April 30, 2014. The shut down means all mobile apps will…
I’m a day late and a dollar short on this story but it’s great to see Microsoft migrate their users to a robust platform that is actively developed rather than shutting down their doors without providing their users any recourse. Upon reading a lot of feedback on the deal, it’s become clear that there is…