For some of us, our 16th birthday was something special. In Germany, you could go to movies rated 16+ and be alone in the cinema until midnight. Others fulfilled their dream of getting a motorcycle license. In the US, you can even get a driver’s license for a car. My blog also turns 16 today and a new chapter begins.
Closure of more plugins in prospect
Last year, I had hoped that I would finally be able to close the Language Fallback plugin. But unfortunately, Preferred Languages has not landed in the Core. However, the now longer release cycles will bring some movement into the matter, as the plugin now has a good chance of finally being included in one of the next major versions. Important preliminary work for the necessary performance optimization has already been implemented in WordPress 6.5 into Core.
At WordCamp Leipzig, I also learned that an interface for my Embeds for ProvenExpert plugin will soon no longer be available. But I’m not too sad about that, because there is now an official plugin from ProvenExpert that also implements blocks. Mine currently only offers widgets, and I save myself the work on the branch that implements the blocks. However, I will of course try to implement a “migration path” for all those who are currently still using my plugin so that they can switch over without any problems.
The numbers for the past year
Visits to the English blog have increased by around 12%, but for the German blog, they have dropped by 23.1%, which I’d assume is also caused by the rise of AI, which presents answers without the need to visit the site. Looking at the Google Search Console, clicks have increased by around 43% and impressions by around 76%. The numbers for the German site are also positive, but not this high.
One interesting metric is the “visit duration”, which increased by 240% for English and 300% for German! So while AI might have caused a drop in overall traffic, the “traffic quality” has increased, and visitors read much longer, once they clicked a link. As I’m not pursuing a commercial purpose with the site, the numbers aren’t that important to me. I’m just happy when I can help others, and especially when someone leaves me a comment. Unfortunately, there were only 7 comments, 2 of them from me. You are all welcome to change that directly under this post 😉
If you want to see more stats for the German blog, you can find them on the translated post – which you might just translate to English, using AI, if you don’t speak German. 😀
Top3 in the past year
- Migrating the Media Library from one site to another
- Quick debugging for SSH connections
- Repair a broken Git Repository file system
The previous top post dropped to the third place. The new two top posts were both written in 2023 and climbed all the way to the top.
When you check the Top3 for German, you will find different topics. The one about how to debug errors in Contact Form 7 was not yet translated into English. But since it was so successful, I did that at the end of last year. I also took the opportunity to test the content again with the current version of WordPress and Contact Form 7 and updated all the screenshots. There is also another piece of news concerning this post, but more on that in a moment.
Classic Themes will still work in 2025
Just 12 months ago, I was optimistic that my project to reimplement the current theme as a block theme would be successful. But less than 2 weeks later, I had to admit to myself that the goal was not achievable in the desired way. In November, I abandoned the project for the time being. In the four months between these two posts, I also invested a lot of time in the theme and had to neglect blogging.
I still plan to replace the current theme, but no longer with the same goal. I will accompany the new attempt with posts again, but perhaps in a different way.
New project: supplementary videos for the blog
I have often faced the problem, that I want to write a blog post on a topic, but found it very difficult to write it in text, code examples and images. Some things are just too complex to explain them well enough in this form, especially when you need a lot of steps and don’t necessarily want to have 20 screenshots of every single one of these steps. That’s why I would like to take on the project of explaining such topics in a video. I already have a YouTube channel (there is also an English one, but currently without any videos) and have already produced a video as a test. And now we’re coming back to the second-placed German post, because this one is probably a good example of a blog post, to record a video for. As soon as it is finished, I will present it in a separate post and probably include it in the original post.
Conclusion
I was able to achieve some goals, but failed on others. I only managed my 26 posts through the Advent calendar in December, but I still really enjoy sharing new posts with you. If the videos work well, you can look forward to completely new topics in the future that I haven’t tried to tackle yet as blog posts.
Of course, there has to be a video at the end. Last year I shared the WordCamp Europe announcement with you, but of course it makes more sense to present my first (German) YouTube video here. Maybe you’d like to do me a favor and subscribe to the channel (or the English one). That might motivate me a bit more to record the next video even faster, or translate the current one. I haven’t tested these “AI video translations with your voice in a different language”, but maybe you can give it a try and tell me how it sounds in English (or you native language). 😉