Shifter looks awesome if it can work as advertised. I’m currently moving my site away from a (now abandoned) SSG platform back to WordPress but I’m not happy about it. If I could get those benefits back it’d be awesome.
Yarn’s looks blazing fast, there is lots to like.
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@darjanpanic Are you in that beta? Your post peaked my curiosity because it said serverless, then I read the landing page. I might be in love… awesome concept right there. I’m about to jump in that beta, I wonder if you are forced to use their CDN or if they would also like allow you to get your whole site gzipped up to use your own CDN.
Either way thanks for the post it gave me ideas if nothing else.
I just signed up but didn’t have much time to see how it works yet. 
In a way a static wp site is similar to a cached page although loading it from cdn and no maintenance/updates does make it appealing. But seems like a good service to keep an eye on.
For sure similar, but at the end of the day with cached pages your wp install is still there on a server accessable to people and bots. If you had something that spit out static html then you had it sitting on a read only drive / CDN with no database then there is really absolutely nothing anybody could do to you except messing with your DNS or something like that. It’s like hosting WP on Google App Engine which is 100% read only, no changes can be made to the filesystem on their servers. You need to push updates from a local checkout.
I’ve had a quick play with the beta. It is very much beta and only the core functionality is there at the moment and it’s not particularly “dynamic” currently. You can package up your custom WordPress install (complete with database, custom theme, plugins etc.) then package it up with a script they have, upload it and the full WordPress install then runs on their servers. Then, you can manually stop your WordPress instance and click the generate button which builds out the static site and pushes it out to their CDN. By not very dynamic, I mean that if you have 10,000 posts and you add a new post, it’ll build out 10,001 posts again when you build a new copy of the static site out.
That said, although it’s clunky at present, it works and it’s a really great concept – I can think of lots of application. As you mentioned, the added security layer is a huge bonus. All paths are written out identically to your WordPress install (wp-content, uploads, themes etc.), so it’s easy to tell it’s built out from a WordPress install but obviously your WordPress site would be sat on a completely different URL.
At present, you can download your static site and upload wherever your like but there’s no automation or anything like that.
As I mentioned, I love the idea that content editors would access the WordPress install and then this would automatically get build out when they’re done with their edits i.e. have a generate button in the toolbar on on the dashboard. That way, any edits all get pushed out together, kind of versioning the content.
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And it uses emojis in the terminal output… can’t beat that! 
It also appears as though you can use yarn (mostly) interchangeably with npm, which is great news for Sage 9.x compatibility. Really good primer here: Migrating from npm | Yarn
Font Awesome 5 is on Kickstarter with an early backer reward of 50% off. The project will remain free and open source but Pro license holders will get access to 1000 more icons, SVG icons, and icon ligatures, all of which seem pretty neat. I’ve used a Font Awesome in so many projects that tossing them a few bucks is a no-brainer. I backed for $20.
The early backer discount only lasts another 60 hours or so as of this post so if you’re gonna back, I recommend doing it soon.
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Thanks for the tip MWDelaney & a great deal for those interested. Wow, a couple of hours ago it was at 32k now over 95k. Happy for those guys.
True that, thx for the heads up
Not WP related, but a pretty nice Security Scanner from Mozilla (integrates some 3rd party scanners aswell). - https://observatory.mozilla.org/
Elementor Pro is releasing soon with 50% off all licences as a pre-order special:
Amazon have launched a VPS service called LightSail: https://amazonlightsail.com. Might be interesting to see if/how this matures over time.
Digital Ocean have also just launched the beta program for their extended graphs, giving better insight into
- Public and private bandwidth usage
- CPU activity
- Disk I/O
- Memory Usage
- Disk Usage
- Top processes sorted by CPU and Memory
Not much info out there outside of beta emails that got sent out but they’ve released the Digital Ocean Agent which collects and makes available the data from within the DO dashboard. A bit more info here: https://github.com/digitalocean/do-agent. The agent can be automatically added to new droplets or a quick install can be made to existing droplets.
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Well, this is unexpected.
Matt Mullenweg wrote
First, early in 2017, we will only promote hosting partners that provide a SSL certificate by default in their accounts. Later we will begin to assess which features, such as API authentication, would benefit the most from SSL and make them only enabled when SSL is there.
Separately, I also think the performance improvements in PHP7 are particularly impressive, and major kudos to everyone who worked on that. We will consider whether hosts use PHP7 by default for new accounts next year as well.
Wordpress 4.7 brings a bunch of useful theme hooks and functions that Sage users may be interested in:
Oh and Elementor Pro is now available:
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Saw this on Hacker News a week ago. Build a new site and template fast:
Seems like a good start for a new template for Roots project.
Hey, just saw this and I am interested! 
@jolaurin
https://galaxy.ansible.com/RiFi2k/stackdriver-logging/
It only works without any configuration on Google Compute Engine servers if you are using AWS EC2 you may need to explore Authorizing the Agent
The role is still rough and only really tested on GCE (because it’s what I use daily) but it adds all the important logs and also every site provisioned gets their access and error logs added.
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Bootstrap 9 dropped IE9 support, goes Flexbox only -
Discussion on Hacker News, if that’s your thing -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13231709
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