Nikita has published a lovely piece on his blog @ tonsky.me about the death of our beloved checkboxes. I urge you to go take a look, especially for all the screenshots.

Sarah Gooding’s “Last Call” at WP Tavern

WordPress has been an important part of my life for the last decade or more. I’m not sure when exactly, but I’ve been subscribed to WP Tavern for a long time now, and it has been an excellent source of news and updates about what’s been happening in the world of WordPress — everything from plugin acquisitions and notable theme releases to security breaches and fixes and other updates. Many of my favorite or most memorable articles were written by Sarah Gooding.

Unfortunately, Sarah has posted possibly her last article on the site, titled “Last Call“. She writes,

This has been an emotional, bittersweet morning for me, reading through old posts, as I close the book on my time at this beloved publication. Today is my last day before moving on to embrace a new challenge in the world of tech.  

In 2013, the year I started writing at the Tavern, just 17.4% of the web was running on WordPress, but the momentum I felt at that last WordCamp San Francisco was intoxicating and undeniable. It marked the ascendency of the global WordPress community and the move to embrace new tools like Slack and GitHub for contributing to core.

At that time, one frustrating thing I frequently heard was “It’s just WordPress, don’t take it so seriously.” Yet there we were, standing on the edge of an amazing acceleration of WordPress’ adoption and expansion of the ecosystem that brought meaningful work to millions and gave people a voice on the web. It was never “just WordPress” to me. As the software enters its third decade, powering 43% of the world’s websites, WordPress continues to be an irrepressible force of good on the web. I’d like to think the Tavern had a small part in that.

WP Tavern has been a fantastic place to get a no-nonsense feed of excellent articles and many of them were written by Sarah herself. I’m actually feeling sad knowing that Matt doesn’t have a ready replacement for Sarah yet, and I’m definitely going to miss Sarah’s content.

I just installed and enabled this fantastic ActivityPub WordPress plugin by Matthias Pfefferle & team Automattic on this blog. You should be able to follow new posts published here going forward by searching for the following user in your favorite Mastodon or Fediverse app of choice.

@[email protected]

Do let me know at https://mastodon.social/@preshit if it works!

I missed this news last month:

For the past 24 years, Media Temple dedicated itself to serving the needs of the digital creative community. Thus, our mantra—for creatives, by creatives.  This mantra led to our decision that now is the time to retire the Media Temple brand and fully integrate into GoDaddy.

GoDaddy acquired Media Temple back in 2013, so props to them for keeping the brand alive all these years. Media Temple was not only one of the best places to host your websites before the acquisition, but also one of the coolest brands to be a part of. Just having the (mt) branding on your website was like a stamp that you were serious about your website.

It’s a shame that they had to go with GoDaddy — I still think GoDaddy is one of the scummiest companies around.

The Freepik Company, known for its projects like Freepik, Wepik, Flaticon and Slidesgo, has announced the acquisition of Iconfinder.

Speaking about the acquisition, Martin LeBlanc — Founder & CEO of Iconfinder, writes:

For now, Iconfinder will stay Iconfinder, and Flaticon will stay Flaticon. My role will transition into the Head of icons, and we’ll start setting up a direction, merging the Iconfinder and Flaticon teams, and making gradual changes. Our goal is to learn from each other what we are best at and apply the practices and approaches to build the world’s best icon site, helping people around the world make beautiful designs faster.

Freepik has been a tremendous resource for designers of any kind, and similarly, Iconfinder’s vast collection of icons has been a personal favorite of mine for many years. I hope to see them collectively improve both the projects down the line.

The WordPress.org homepage and the WordPress.org/download page have just gotten a much-needed makeover.

Nicholas Garofalo, writing on WordPress.org News:

The new homepage brings more attention to the benefits and experience of using WordPress, while also highlighting the community and resources to get started.

The new download page greets visitors with a new layout that makes getting started with WordPress even easier by presenting both the download and hosting options right at the top.

This redesign follows the redesign of the WordPress News blog earlier this year.

ExpressVPN has just announced that they will be removing their physical servers located in India, refusing to comply with India’s new VPN law.

With a recent data law introduced in India requiring all VPN providers to store user information for at least five years, ExpressVPN has made the very straightforward decision to remove our Indian-based VPN servers.

Rest assured, our users will still be able to connect to VPN servers that will give them Indian IP addresses and allow them to access the internet as if they were located in India. These “virtual” India servers will instead be physically located in Singapore and the UK.

Under the new VPN law that is set to come into effect on Jun 27, 2022, the company states that they will be “required to store users’ real names, IP addresses assigned to them, usage patterns, and other identifying data” which effectively “is incompatible with the purpose of VPNs, which are designed to keep users’ online activity private.

The law is also overreaching and so broad as to open up the window for potential abuse. We believe the damage done by potential misuse of this kind of law far outweighs any benefit that lawmakers claim would come from it.

ExpressVPN refuses to participate in the Indian government’s attempts to limit internet freedom. As a company focused on protecting privacy and freedom of expression online, we will continue to fight to keep users connected to the open and free internet with privacy and security, no matter where they are located.

ExpressVPN is one of the most popular VPN services in the market today and I had been a customer for a while, only switching to Mullvad because I wanted the flexibility in billing. I am certain that other VPN companies are going to follow in the same steps. Any company that doesn’t, is a company worth staying away from.

The WordPress News website has just gotten a beautiful new design, which was led by designer Beatriz Fialho.

My favorite thing about this redesign isn’t just the boldness of the design with that striking shade of blue, it’s that the design uses the beautiful Inter family for the body text, combined with EB Garamond for the headings.