right captions should now be working for everyone. It is news roundup today on solid Academy. We have a lot to talk about today, including a WordPress release major shakeups in the AI world, and some pretty significant security vulnerabilities. Just a few things a chat about today. So we are just now about five minutes away from getting started. Glad you're here as you open up, Zoom pop up in the chat, check in say hi, tell us where you're logging in from and you will find also the link bundle there with today's slides as well as the replay link if you'd like to go back and review or share after we're finished today. Many things to talk about many many things to talk about today. You have the slides there if you'd like to all the links are there if you want to review those. So so just about Yeah, four and a half minutes to go. Something like that. Yeah. Hey, Doug. The our three recurring revenue retreat was quite good. It's always a good event. It's an intentionally small event that is focused on growing recurring revenue. You gotta love it and it's at Disney so that's always great. Ah damn, I Debra. I don't understand what you mean. Signing up for this class. So you're in the Zoom though, right? So you're you signed up I guess I don't understand what you're asking.
Yeah, the link is the replay link, which is currently you tried to sign up sign up for what Deb? DEBORAH
Okay, that's where I'm confused Deborah, because you're in the zoom. So you're in the class. You don't have to sign up. You're in zoom. Now right? As it's coming through the Zoom chat
Okay, Chris is looking at it. Not sure why that would be happening. Gotcha. Thank you, Deborah. I didn't understand what you're saying. I'm also not feeling well today. And so my mind is not like processing at normal speed. Got it. All right. Yeah. Chris is gonna look into that. Okay, folks, we're about two minutes away from getting started. Welcome. Welcome. Everybody. It is news roundup today. The links for today I just dropped in the chat. Once again, the slides are there the replay link. Welcome everybody. And let's see if I missed burn Stacy. Stratos welcome from Greece. Got a lot to talk about today in the news roundup. We are two minutes away from getting started. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat and say Hello Hey Ben. Hey Heather. Hey Kim.
Okay, Chris found the issue of that weird link looping thing and is going to Chris can you fix that? I can. That's weird. All right. Chris has got that issue fix because he's awesome
in the process of fixing so he's almost awesome and about to be completely awesome. Okay, folks a minute to go. Just fixing problems live. You know? As we do Yeah, apparently the link wasn't present on that event, for whatever reason. Yeah, weird. Okay. 30 seconds to go, everybody. Welcome to News RoundUp. We're just about to get started. If you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat in there. And you will find the link to today's slides as well as the replay link. That will be available about an hour after we wrap up. Just about ready to get started.
Alright folks, it is three minutes after I'm going to start the recording and we will dive right in. Well, happy Tuesday, everybody. Good evening. Good morning. Good afternoon, wherever you happen to be around the world. Welcome to another solid Academy live stream it is WordPress news roundup today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at the solid Academy and each month we take a look across the ecosystem of WordPress and bring you the stories that we think are the most important to those of us who build and manage sites for clients. So we have a lot to talk about today. If you're just joining us in zoom. Once again, I see several folks just join I'm going to drop in the link to today's slides, which is there in the chat. If you're watching this on the replay. You can just scroll down below the video and you'll find the download slides button there as well. These slides are important especially because they have all the links to all the things if you want to go back and read more you can do that with these links. All right, so let's get started as we normally do with news from core. So we've had a major WordPress release since the last time we talked together in news roundup, so two weeks ago. Was that right? Yeah. Two weeks ago on November the seven WordPress 6.4 surely was released. It was called a release with style. Okay. I was basically focused on smoothing out the editor experience, and it really has done that it's a good job of smoothing over a lot of the maybe bumpier spots particularly in the site editor. It's also brought some great improvements to the block editor itself. There's some new keyboard shortcuts lists are a little better. There's enhanced control over the way links work which is really great. Toolbar is a lot better. In group blocks like navigation and lists and quilt blocks, that sort of thing. Here's just a quick overview video that they created for us to showcase some of those major improvements. Right here you can see you can edit pages directly from the site editor. One of my favorite features is here in these group blocks like a quote block. The toolbar now stays on top that was super aggravating to me in dealing with the editor before it's also made it easier to duplicate blocks now with a Ctrl Shift D or Command Shift D will right there in the list view lets you duplicate blocks to move those around. It's really really nice. It's also made it a bit easier to combine list elements with a drag so much of this is just a grab it and drag it and boom. You just combine items in the list. So that's pretty cool. As a lot of other improvements. Those are some of the major ones. There's also a lot of improvements in the command palette, which is that command bar not sure why they call it palette. I kind of like Command Bar better but it didn't ask me. But the command palette has a lot of new improvements. You can much more quickly find what you need and perform tasks efficiently. But because as you open up the command palette, some of the frequently you know like the things that contextual items that you might be looking for right in that spot are going to automatically appear so like if you're in the page, you just opening it up gives you some of the things that you might most frequently do which is really helpful. They're going to continue to iterate on this command palette, and it's going to become more and more a part of the way we use WordPress. Going forward. A couple of other interesting things that were added in WordPress six for our image light boxes. So zooming out an image and darkening the area. Behind it so that the image pops out. That's now part of core WordPress. It used to require some sort of plug in to get that functionality. It can be applied globally. So automatically all your images when you click on them, they'll lightbox open, or you can just apply it to images specifically which is kind of nice, also has been added in WordPress six for a block hooks function that will allow developers to automatically insert dynamic blocks at different points. It's going to make theming a lot easier. And we'll see that starting to work and work. Its way into WordPress development in the coming months. There are also some significant performance improvements in core WordPress. They've made some improvements of object caching which just makes things load faster. also improving the way that images and iframes are handled, as well as an improved scripts and styles later all these are work of the WordPress performance team that has been working really really well on lowering the core load times of WordPress which is pretty awesome. Here's a few important couple of important WordPress resources every release they publish a field guide. This gives you links into the details of all the things that are in this version of WordPress. This is a great link to go and browse and learn more yourself. Also, here's a great way to get involved with WordPress if maybe over the holidays you have some time you'd like to give back. Maybe you've never given back to WordPress before. This is a great way to do it. And it's simply by helping with documentation for end users. You don't have to be a developer. It's actually sometimes better if you're not a developer, to be on the Docs team to explain things in plain language to regular users of WordPress. So if you want to a great way to give back just reach out on that called volunteers posts there and see if there's a place you might be able to fit in something that also was added in WordPress six four is that not really added actually removed. Attachment pages are now disabled by default. In WordPress six for now attachment pages are those pages that WordPress by default creates for every media item that is uploaded in WordPress. Now many SEO plugins just remove those altogether. Or they suggest their removal because they're really low content. They're off they can often cause problems for SEO because they're using some keywords because of media names but there's really no content they're just not great. So any new site created with WordPress six four will not have attachment pages by default. existing sites are unchanged. But new sites automatically will just redirect like an attachment page link back to the image URL. There's currently no UI for toggling this on or off which was a controversial decision, but there will likely be a core plugin released pretty soon that undoes all the things that core just did like they always do. So if you like attachment pages for whatever reason, you'll be able to turn those back on or they're you're not going to notice it at all on sites that just upgraded to WordPress six four but if you install WordPress six, four from now forward, there will now be no attachment pages. For me I say great. I didn't like attachment pages to begin with. Something else that's been added to six four are the performance improvements regarding translations. This has been a major focus of the Project Gutenberg translations take forever to load it just they really slow down a site because of the way translations had to work. Now WordPress has you implemented a new lightweight translation library that just makes everything load faster? It will support actual PHP files now instead of the old binary.mo files that had to be used before it lowers memory usage. This has been tested by many 1000s and the featured plugin for this and it's now part of core which is great. Another big change for WordPress six four is that WordPress six four now recommends PHP 8.1 or higher so that is now stated recommended version 8.1 or higher and the reason is PHP eight dot o reaches end of life this week, so no more security support. PHP eight oh is gone. So if you have not yet upgraded to 8.1 or two in your hosting platform, you should really look into that because eight dot O will no longer be supported at all for anything after November the 26th. So you can learn more about WordPress his recommendation there on the hosting page and in the handbook. Well, WordPress six four was released and all of a sudden there was a quick scramble to get WordPress six dot 4.1 out because a major problem occurred in relationship to curl. Now curl is a How can I describe this? It's It's an extension to PHP that does some back ground internal things that certain plugins like to use with interaction with external services so basically what was going on here is WordPress six four dropped in all of a sudden some sites started having trouble with the stripe API and in weird things happening inside of WP admin, particularly the oxygen page builder was having some issues and other just really slow, weird things going on. And it turns out this was related to certain web hosts we're running a very, very, very out of date insecure version of curl
pressable social media won the day as they posted on X pressable is of course a managed WordPress hosting service that is owned by automatic. They said low if you're wondering if your pressable sites are impacted by the recent curl bug you're safe. We don't run ancient security compromised versions of curl from 2013. That's what we were dealing with here. So you know, and they actually tweeted the next day. If you are impacted by this do an immediate audit of your hosting seriously. This is a symptom of major issue and they're right. It's this is not just being you know, being honored on social media. If you're if you've had issues with this problem with curl, it means that your web host is not paying attention to the versions of software that are in your environment. And it's really problematic because there's this version of curl that affected WordPress six four is way out of date and had has major security issues. These are things that the host needs to address. So the core team scrambled and responded quickly got this patch out. So that was a really good thing to celebrate. However, it also raises questions about how far back should we test things are to avoid similar issues in the future. But I mean, look, this is a host problem, not a WordPress core problem. So I don't know I'm not sure what they're going to do about this pretty interesting. Along with WordPress 6.4 comes 2024 You know, the fall things don't really excite me a lot, but 2024 is pretty cool. I will say it is elegant and versatile. It's probably the most usable default theme that I've seen in a long time. It's got a lot of patterns built into it. You can do a lot with it. So here's just a quick screen capture of the theme homepage example. It's really quite good. Surprisingly, especially for a default theme. I like it a lot if you haven't played around with it. Play around with it. You could do that actually in WordPress playground. Just spin up a WordPress playground and 2024 should be in there. By default. It has a full collection of patterns for the homepage posts archive templates, you can it's a great way to play around with the site editor if you've never done that before. Pretty nice. You could use them as a starting point for lots of different things so I take a look at it. The core team has also put out a new WordPress showcase page on wordpress.org. This was released last month. The visuals are very bold. The new wordpress.org design is very bold, very bold. If you haven't seen it yet it is they've made some design decisions. I kinda like it, but it is very bold. So anyway, you've got blocks that are happening there. improved user experience, it's easy to find things. You can take a look at it and see some of the news. The sites that are had been built in WordPress for a recognizable companies and brands. Closing out the core section here. The three major relations releases for WordPress have been planned for 2024. The release dates have thankfully been scheduled to avoid major holidays and other WordPress events like the famous release of WordPress five during WordCamp us not a great look. But WordPress six five will drop in March 6 Sixth and July 6, seventh and November. We'll have the actual dates the closer we get to those time periods. So we're moving into an interesting part of Project Gutenberg here. And that is this collaboration feature which I'm really pretty excited about collaboration meaning two people working on the same page at the same time. And if you've ever used tools like figma where you can see people's mouse's actually in doing things. That is what I'm expecting the collaboration within Corp WordPress to look like. Pretty neat. And I'm really looking forward to see what 2024 is going to bring to core. Alright, speaking of Gutenberg, let's turn the page over there and see what those folks have been working on Gutenberg 16.9 dropped on October the 25th. It allows you to now rename almost all the blocks in the editor. So they allowed us to rename group blocks in 16.7 and now just about any block can be renamed other than these side editing things like the header and the footer. So you can't rename the header but you can rename this group. So that's pretty cool. Now by the way, Kadence has been able to do this for some time. Core is now catching up to that but even here within the group, you can rename the various pieces so that's pretty cool. I love that by the way, if when building with blocks, it's just really nice to be able to rename those those items in the list view. List View has become my favorite way to interact with the block editor. We can also now duplicate and rename patterns a lot easier. The way that looks like this. So here's a pattern on a page and you can rename it or duplicate it right there on the block. Also here with right here in the pattern list pretty cool. Some other notable highlights in Gutenberg 16 Nine the dimension has designed tools a little better, and they've changed up some of the relative given us more relative units in the viewport for controlling how things look. Gutenberg 17 was released on November the ninth continual improvements to the command palette with better contextual suggestions This was actually rolled into WordPress six four I believe. They said look, quality of life changes like this What's going to make the command palette a joy to use and I agree just being able to find the most frequently accessed functions when you write on a page just going to be a lot easier. Like for example, how many of you still to this day struggle where to view a page. Once you say that like previewed a new tab. I'd still struggle with that. The command palette is going to be right there in the palette. So that's kind of nice. They've also given us a glimpse into what some of the next gen WordPress components might look like. Like within the WordPress editors. This new drop down menu class is pretty cool. This is what it will likely look like as menus fold out within the editor. It's really nice and this just gives us a glimpse into where the design is heading. All right, let's turn the page and start talking about security. Our number of vulnerabilities continues to stay very high. This is a result of companies like patch stack and others investing in bug bounties and vulnerability bounties. It basically funding the work of security researchers to find these issues, report them so they can be patched. This is it's actually you know, you might say well more vulnerabilities are being reported. That's bad for WordPress. This is actually great for WordPress. These it's not like these vulnerabilities didn't exist before they were there and not reported. So now they're being reported and fixed. Which is excellent and it's true. This just makes WordPress more secure for everybody. So of course with solid security Pro you can reduce your site's risk to nearly zero using our site scan version management and the patch stack firewall. version management and solid security Pro will actually automatically apply a patch if it exists. And in the meantime the patch deck firewall patches everything virtually. So even if a developer hasn't released a patch, the patch tech firewall will fix that vulnerability, which is pretty cool. Speaking of major vulnerabilities if you're a lightspeed user, this was not a great bit of news to read Lightspeed plugin bug puts 4 million sites at risk for a cross site scripting issue. The vulnerability does require that you're using the edge side includes ESI functions, which many Lightspeed users like myself are not using. The weird thing here and I still haven't been able to find out more information about this Lightspeed patch the issue almost immediately in their git repository for the plugin, but they delayed the release of the fix for like two months. I'm not sure it was going on there. But just make sure if you're using the Lightspeed plugin that it's up to date at the latest version of War of 5.7 or higher.
Another major plugin that had a bug over the last month was the WP fastest cache plugin 600,000 sites exposed to attacks. This was bad because it allowed an unauthenticated user to edit the cached pages as an admin, not good. So that could fully compromise a site and even possibly a server. An update was released and just as a precaution they say if you're using fastest cache, reset all passwords for all admin users. One other non WordPress security issue that popped up was this AI leakage flaw in Safari, so if you are in the Apple ecosystem, this is not good news. Safari browser on Apple's ARM based chips that's Apple's eight chips and M chips, has a vulnerability that can expose passwords and sensitive data, in effect effects Macs and iPhones from 2020 forward. Researchers disclosed the vulnerability to Apple last year showing how they could attack Gmail, YouTube, Instagram etc. Apple has not released a fix for this yet. It requires a high level of technical expertise to exploit it's not yet been exploited in the wild. A permanent fix says Apple is forthcoming. Hopefully forthcoming is soon because I don't like reading things like this. If you want to read more about it yeah, you can read more on that article and others that are linked. All right, let's talk a little bit about solid WP. We've got a bunch of premium events coming up for our solid Academy members. Office hours continues every Thursday except this week. This week. It's tomorrow because it's a holiday week here in the US. Thanksgiving is Thursday. So an early Happy Thanksgiving to everybody here if you're in the US. And we'll have office hours tomorrow for those of you that are members. This month premium course is creating a Starter Site. It's gonna be a lot of fun. And we have our final fly on December the 13th. And our December premium event is optimizing that Starter Site. So those are two great courses coming up. Also for free. Live streams. We have our plugin roundup coming up on December the fifth the best of December a July through December coming up on December the sixth and of course news roundup on December the 12th. Another great event you may have if you if you miss this was Kadence amplify if you're a Kadence user. This is definitely one to go back and rewatch an excellent series of live streams at the Kadence amplify event just using Kadence in a practical way replays are available there at the link on the screen. Last thing I'll mention related to solid and stellar are the great variety of Black Friday deals that are available across the stellar verse 40% off all brands in the stellar verse for Black Friday and Cyber Monday that includes give Kadence the events calendar by the way, even $200 off of the I have the lifetime license 40% off of bundles and 25% off of early renewals. So that's pretty good. Also the events calendar LearnDash orderable restrict content pro iconic, force us at solid WP and WP business reviews so all stellar brands 40% off for Black Friday, Cyber Monday you can click the link right there and check out those deals. Let's talk about some plugins. This is mostly WooCommerce news because Wu has been doing a lot over the last month including rebranding to woo. Now we've been calling WooCommerce woo just that's what we've called it for years and years now WooCommerce has officially changed its name to woo they've adopting the nickname that its customers have been using for a long time. They're aiming to streamline product naming across all of their services. And they're currently emphasizing their new hosted e commerce solution. Whoo Express which we'll talk about more in just a minute. And it'll be interesting to see how this reduced emphasis on self hosted whoo could affect the brand with will express coming. I currently Woo is still seeing strong growth and community engagement. WooCommerce customers will not be affected by the name change beyond an admin notice about it in their dashboards. We'll start to see this whoo branding all over the place now. So what is this will express thing that they launched. It's basically a managed hosting service a managed WooCommerce hosting that includes a lot of the core WooCommerce plugins. So they're using the wordpress.com hosting infrastructure for hosting and maintenance. And while they're not stating it directly WooCommerce or pardon me, I'm gonna keep saying that will express is built I'm certain to take on Shopify, it's a hosted ecommerce solution. Shopify currently has a 16% market share compared to was 60%. So they are just slightly you know, changing things a little bit to give those folks that like Shopify something very similar. With with will express. It comes with some pre installed extensions and professionally designed themes. It's directly competing with GoDaddy and Bluehost. Managed woo hosting. It ships with a new block based theme called Sue Bucky. And we'll see what happens is there's going to be one to watch and it certainly is an opportunity for those of us serving clients to use that tool to build sites. Something else WooCommerce has done. Something else woo has done in this last month is roll out high performance order storage. Now this is a big deal and it is a long time coming and a good thing for WooCommerce. So one of the big drawbacks of WooCommerce, especially for older stores is that you have all this order data that's stored in the posts table in the database, and that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So WooCommerce HP o s high performance order storage, moves those orders out of posts and into their own set of tables. This absolutely speeds things up. We've seen significant speed increases on the sites that we manage it is now enabled by default for new installs. Starting with WooCommerce 7.1. And it it speeds a lot of things up like order creation checkout. Searching for orders on the back end is much faster, it's just better all the way around. existing stores can enable H POS under Advanced settings and features and it will tell you there are some plugins mostly third party plugins that are not compatible with H POS. And that's an issue like but it will show you there in the advanced settings and features area if you have plugins activated that are incompatible with H POS, and you'll have to wait for those to become compatible to use it. But there's a thorough fact of how to make the switch. It's really pretty simple. Matter of fact, I demonstrated that in an office hours just a few weeks ago when this first was released. H POS great news for Whoo. Great news for websites just makes everything faster. Jetpack 12.8, has also now launched a new feature called Jetpack creator that allows even novice users to monetize their content. This is good news. So the idea here is to help content creators, monetize content, create subscribers, it gives access to 40 different blocks that can be used in a site to create paywalls and payments and that sort of thing. They've built the revenue side of this in an interesting way. It's free with a 10% transaction fee, so it doesn't cost you anything to use. And they get 10% of your revenue or at 995 a month they dropped the transaction fee down to 2%. So I will see there's a point where it's better to go free and then a tipping point. This makes sense to become a member, and so forth. So I it's an interesting way for anybody to start monetizing content without a whole lot of complication. That's kind of nice. All right, let's move on into some AI news. There have been some things happening in the AI world if you're not aware of it. We'll start off with some great news first. Couple of weeks ago, open AI hosted their first developers event they called dev day that was again back on November the sixth in San Francisco. Chat GPT now has over 100 million active users every week. That's pretty amazing. They announced several new things First of all, being sorry, I'm getting over some sickness here.
The most important being GPT four turbo, which is the next iteration of chat. GPT GPT five, four turbo roughly quadruples, the amount of information that chat GPT can consider at a time and it has a knowledge cut off of April of this year. So we've gotten several more months of knowledge added to chat GPT which is great. Another interesting little addition here is that users like you even can create your own no code GPT that's trained on custom datasets, like your email like documents like a knowledge base, but in PDF, you can train your own GPT using the chat GPT engine and you can even make those GP tees available in the new GPT store that's now searchable. I'd go take a look at some of the GP teas people have created. It's pretty interesting. They've now also made the Dali three image generator, a part of chat GPT plus and enterprise which is cool. They also announced a new program called Copy shield that will defend businesses that use AI if they get a copyright claim against them, which alleviates a lot of concerns about using AI. There's also a new text to speech AI API that was introduced for chat GBT. I think we'll see some things start to use that. So a lot of hype coming out of DEV day and then boom, open AI last week fired their CEO Sam Altman, he was fired abruptly by the board of directors for reasons that are still a little unclear. Greg Brockman was who was the president of open AI also stepped down on Monday. That's yesterday, both Altman and Brockman were hired by Microsoft, which was a significant investor in open AI So now comes All right, what's gonna happening here with Microsoft? Well, Microsoft, as you may remember, several months ago, or maybe, you know, several months ago, invested $10 billion in open AI. It's now come to it's not come to the surface. This is mostly non cash. They sent a little cash but mostly their investment was this cloud computing resources. So this gives Microsoft a little bit of leverage. After open a IC o was ousted in the process that Microsoft CEO says was mishandled. So here's the other little interesting bit. In their deal. Microsoft has the has rights to open API's intellectual property, if their partnership ends, so it's possible Microsoft could attract AI talent and train models without open AI at all. They continue to stay they're committed to the partnership. Another page turns in that yesterday, open AI staff have threatened to quit now unless the board resigns nearly all of open AI as employees have threatened to quit and follow Sam Altman to Microsoft unless the board resigns and reinstates him so 700 of 770 employees signed a letter stating they're unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgment and care for our mission and employees. Wow. Among the signatories, is mera Marathi open AI AIS chief technology officer who had been named interim CEO. Yesterday former Twitch CEO immature was named the CEO of open AI. There's chaos happening here, folks. And it could reshape the world of AI development for the foreseeable future, depending on how the dust settles. So this is one to watch and things are changed like I updated this just a couple of hours ago. This is going to be one to watch. We'll see All right, coming out of open API's dev day they had some problems. There's been an overwhelming demand that straining capacity for chat GPT it's worked a lot of itself out now. But it still it can be an issue if you're not paying for chat GPT to get access. existing users can still access features like GPT four, there's a waitlist now for new signups though demand is so high that chat GPT Plus subscription accounts are being sold on eBay, which is pretty amazing. They're open I did experience some DDoS attacks and heavy usage after death day. Yeah, this you know, it's interesting. This is like a soap opera unfolding in the AI world. Alright, turning a page to what Microsoft is doing. Once again, Microsoft has now upgraded, replaced rename depending on what you want to use. It's now no longer called being chat. It is now called co pilot. Microsoft co pilot is Microsoft's new AI that is focused on commercial data protection. So maybe you heard the story several months ago about the Samsung employee he was trying to solve a development issue and provided a whole bunch of proprietary Samsung code into a chat GBT conversation and now that the whole chat GPT model has learned Samsung's proprietary code base and that you can't just go remove it because it's AI. Anyway, so Microsoft has built this AI to be a much more protective of commercial data. They all copilot gets a dedicated website and open AI integration enables tailored user experiences within copilot so there's still some open AI tie in developers can create copilot plugins through the Microsoft Partner center. So particularly if you're in the Microsoft side of things you might want to check that out. Another entry is brave into the AI arena. Brave of course is a privacy first web browser that blocks trackers and adds privacy is their thing. So they've now introduced Leo, which is a browser based AI assistant that's designed privacy first haven't played with Leo yet but it sounds pretty interesting. Leo does not log conversations or use them to train its own AI models. It's similar to Bing chat and Google Bard. It's rolling out to desktop browser users first. There's also a premium version with with support so check that out if you are a brave person, or if you're just wanting something with more privacy focus when it comes to AI. Their goal is to kind of set the standard for privacy like they've done with the browser. Alright, one more bit of AI news actually a couple of things. This is a big one. The Biden administration has issued a sweeping executive order that governs AI so a few weeks ago, President Biden signed an executive order to ensure that America leads the way and seizing the promise and managing the risks of AI that sounds political, doesn't it? A new a new standards for AI security, privacy and testing are are mandated. Also watermarking standards are mandated for AI generating content. Developers like Google and Microsoft will need to submit results before releasing any models publicly. Immigration officials are asked to ease visa rules for foreign AI experts to help companies recruit top global AI talent. Interesting little tidbit. Bruce Reed Biden's chief of staff told The Associated Press the president became more concerned over AI threats after watching the film Mission Impossible. Dead Reckoning part one. Do what you want to do with that but the issue is this. I don't think we this is me. Okay. I don't think we can trust corporate America to be I just don't think they're trustworthy with AI. So I think we do need some public regulation on this. AI is awful and awesome all at the same time. So we'll see how this actually works out. Yes, Stacy, I don't we don't know that we can trust the government either. Yeah, okay. Keeping on going here before we all get scared to death by the power of destructive AI and you know, the world become Grammarly. Everybody loves Grammarly. Right so Grammarly has this really neat new AI edition called the personalized voice detection. So it basically looks at your writing and learns how you write pretty cool. Your voice profile is the essence of your unique writing style. It absorbs your tone and nuances. I think that's kind of neat. So the rollout is aimed at Business and Education customers that need a consistent style Yeah, so in initial testing, some users found the AI was overriding original text without permission. This is going to get better. But something to check out if you're a grammerly person. I think it's kind of nice to make my own voice that can be used to write
artificially. Alright, let's take a look at an interesting little bit of SEO news. The 2023 Google local search ranking factors have been released. This is an annual survey that really is an industry go to resource when it comes to understand better how sites rank and local search. The the group white spark.ca pulls top experts in local search to see you know what they're doing that's working and not working. And then they'll publish those findings. 149 potential factors were looked at and factors in top of these lists we're about to see appear to have the most significant rankings again, this is not like Google's own research. This is reports from SEO people who are willing to share what they know. So take it with a grain of salt, but there's some pretty good information here. So there were seven different factors that were considered. And as you might imagine, in the local pack, are the things that Google business profile the signals they say, are the top factor, which just makes sense. On page reviews links. I would recommend we're not going to have time really to spend a lot on a lot of these factors. There's a great link, I would go read this if you're into SEO. So, for example here ranking in the local pack, being in the right category, right some of these things are no brainers, right keywords in the title, very important approximate distance from the point of search, physical address in the city of search. So these are things just to look at and there's more like this continues to go down in this. This is just a screenshot of the first part. But there's a lot of good information here. In this report. If you do SEO that you really ought to pay attention to this, for example, here, a dedicated page for every service. Whenever we talk about SEO training. You hear this over and over again. If you have multiple services in a business, make sure every service has its own page so it can rank separately in especially your local search. Good internal linking inbound links. So these are things that many of these haven't changed much, but it's a good reminder of what we ought to be building towards. If we're trying to build a site to attract search, what affects negatively put in the wrong category. That's a no brainer, right? But you know, site hack, negative sentiment and Google reviews has a pretty good impact. So yeah, take a look at this. If you're into SEO, I think you'll find it very, very interesting. The link is here. And lots more data there in the report. All right. Let's turn the page to some other news. This is stuff that didn't fit anywhere else. Basically. If you're a Cloudflare user you were very sad over the last month like I was after Cloudflare was down for several days in major I it didn't stop working. You just couldn't do anything with it. You couldn't add a change DNS alias. There's a lot the dashboard wasn't working for a number of days. Bad things happen to Cloudflare they published a thoughtful post mortem in the in the wake of their outage earlier this month. The too long didn't read version was there was a power outage at their primary data center that was compounded by a generator failure at the data center, and then a cascade of communication and process failures by the data center management. So Cloudflare doesn't own the data center. They just take a lot of it. This. This was the quote from the post mortem that just I mean, the overnight shift consisted of security and an unaccompanied technician who had only been on the job for a week. I mean, I feel really sorry for that. Person. Can you imagine if you're the unaccompanied technician, I've just been here a week. You know, the the some of the failures that were involved here were they couldn't get to the area to reboot or to flip the breaker or flip the whatever on Cloud flares servers because the access control to the door was controlled by the primary generator which is offline like we couldn't even physically get to the thing. It was just it was such a mess. Anyway, it's a funny like I actually enjoyed reading this because it's quite something and let's just say lessons were learned. And hopefully Cloudflare will get better with this. This wasn't the thing that they didn't have a contingency plan. This was like a perfect storm scenario of things. And it literally was just a perfect storm. So something else that's out there. That's a big deal is that there is a ruling the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear that could change the internet forever. Now that sounds like a clickbait headline, but it's really not. So social media companies are struggling to handle a growing onslaught of misinformation. In September, the US Supreme Court announced that would rule on laws in Texas and Florida, restricting social media sites from removing users and posts. Now the goal of the laws in Texas and Florida is to prevent censorship of political candidates and individual viewpoints that was a charge that was levied in some of the wake of the last presidential election that some comments are being filtered out and whatever, by the political views of these social media platforms. But Texas and Florida have said you can't do that anymore. Now the problem is the First Amendment protects individuals from government censorship, but it's unclear the extent to which this applies to private enterprise. Can I say to Facebook, you can't stop. You can't censor what I say because I have first amendment rights. I don't know about that. It's a legally complicated issue, which naturally says could transform speech on the Internet as we know it today. And I don't think that's an understatement. So this is definitely going to be one to watch. There's an article there from the Hill that gives a pretty decent non biased view of the whole thing. There are really good arguments to be made on both sides, whatever you feel about the actual end issue, which is social media platforms, censoring or filtering certain types of speech. It's a complicated issue and it really could change the way the internet is handled. Going forward. All right. Tumblr, fumbles and down scales. Automatic Of course, purchased Tumblr a number of years ago, it is failing to reach its growth goals. So the previous growth strategy was unsuccessful. They can't sustain tumblers current infrastructure and staff. They have chosen not to do any layoffs, which is automatic style. But they have moved a lot of folks into other divisions of automatic and they're focused on improving their core features. So we'll see what happens there. Another big move from automatic in the last month automatic has acquired an app called texts $50 million with the goal of open sourcing, messaging. Interesting. So texts as an app aggregates messages from all different sorts of direct messaging apps. Like think of everything you have direct messaging channels in and texts likely has a way to bring all those into one universal messaging app. And automatic is focused on open sourcing messaging. This is an interesting acquisition for them. Texts uses on device encryption for security. The plan is to push out a text mobile app with push notifications. Currently only a paid version, but likely a limited free version will be available. That's one to watch for sure. Something else going on is that Chrome, Google has decided that through Chrome, they will begin to block third party cookies, starting sometime in mid 2024. Google is replacing the cookie with an API. Now a lot of this is because of privacy concerns, from particularly European countries. Ultimately, I think this is a really good thing. So they're going to replace cookies all together with interest based API targeting that doesn't share user data. So you know, the argument is, you know, websites are going to have ads, right? So would you rather see ads that are relevant to you, or not relevant to you? I mean, I would really, probably rather see relevant ads. But this is a way to do that in a way that doesn't share direct user data, just an interest category. So Google has said developers must adopt the new API within two years. They say their goal is improving privacy while still allowing these irrelevant ads. Critics say Google's just once again submitting an advantage for themselves. Well, of course, I mean, they've got a browser and they're selling ads. And I mean, that's why they're doing this. We'll see if it ends up in a lawsuit. It always ends up in a lawsuit in some way. But there'll be a major shift in digital advertising. So that is coming next year.
Another big company move apple. Did you see this one? Apple has planned to begin supporting RCS which is likely going to end SMS forever. So Apple is going to add the RCS messaging protocol to be supported in iPhones late and late 2024. That is likely the next release of whatever the new OS is. For the for iOS. The change should end messaging compatibility issues between Apple and Android and whatever else is out there. RCS is an upgrade to the old SMS MMS standard. It allows sharing quite a higher quality media sharing and read receipts between platforms, which is really good. Again, the move likely motivated by EU digital market act, and probably will be the end of SMS as we know it. It's unclear if the green bubbles for Android users will still remain. But it should again this all should hit with the next iOS version, which usually happens in September. Interesting. All right, one more bit here. It is about to be Black Friday, Cyber Monday and those deals are on I mentioned earlier 3% off all the brands in the stellar verse including solid Kadence give the events calendar LearnDash and more you can check that out at stellar wp.com/black-friday. Here's a few more deal aggregation pages that you might want to take a look at the post status bfcm deal page is quite good as is the WP weekly, and of course then P beginner Those are three great sources to find your Black Friday, Cyber Monday deals. Just a few other things that are worth a look. The Google CEO has detailed how Chrome helped grow Google Search. This is an interesting read. I skimmed it just the other day. And I think it's just an interesting retrospect on how Chrome has helped Google grow another thing this morning okay, this is a time suck but I really enjoyed clicking through this it's called Internet artifacts. It's another little addition from Neil dot fun there's a lot of stuff on Neil dot fun again, it's a time suck, but so much fun. I 57 artifacts from 30 years of the internet, including things like the first ever use of lol and things like that. It's just a fun little site to go when you have a little bit of time to waste at Neil that fun and last of all an interesting read called failing forward. So this is the wrong link. Oh my. That is totally the wrong link. Chris, if you're still on here, if you could drop the right link for that in the chat. That would be great. This is totally on me. But I added this late and I it's it's a wonderful it's a wonderful article that you currently can't read with the link that details from many of WordPress leading product experts like Yoast MerKiVa and Rachmat Cromwell, Devon White Walker, Katie Keith and Jamie Marsland where they failed and what the you know what, how they would handle things differently. And it's a wonderful article for which we will have a link in the chat entirely. And in the meantime, let's take a look at WordPress. Community News. The state of the word for 2023 is coming up on December the 11th in Madrid. There's not a link available for that yet, but it will certainly be floating around WordPress channels. Right before that. A few upcoming global word camps have been announced word camp Asia is in March. In Taipei, Thailand, where camp you're up in Torino, Italy is June 13 through the 15th as well to great flagship word camps on the books for next year already. Okay, there is the link in the chat if you're watching this on the replay. I apologize. Just open the chat log right at the end. You'll see Chris's link to the freemius.com blog post from those failing forward. It's a really great article. And it has videos from each of these WordPress product founders talking about their biggest failures and what they learned from them. All right, folks, that brings us to the end. Of the WordPress news roundup for November 2023. Thanks for hanging out with me for about the last hour or so. And hopefully you found a few interesting things. Maybe a few scary things, but maybe you know what to do about them now. We'll be back for office hours tomorrow for members. This is an abbreviated week here on solid Academy. As it is Thanksgiving across the United States. If you're celebrating Thanksgiving, have a great restful week, and be thankful for those things that you have. Alright folks, we'll see you tomorrow members for solid Academy's office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.