I have an announcement! 🏫 I’ve just taken a handful of lessons from my new course and made them public, 100% free. You don’t even have to register for anything. 😄 I call it the Whimsical Animation Open House. The doors are open until the launch sale ends, early next week. ✨

Some interesting nuggets from the latest Search Off The Record Podcast: Here is Google's Nikola Todorovic, Director of Software Engineering at Google Search, about how AI is used to impact rankings and why simpler linear systems are sometimes easier to debug than more complex AI systems:

There's a new #webperf measurement API in the works! Check out this post looking at the work @jason-williams.co.uk and @jdapena.bsky.social have been putting into there Container Timing—available as an origin trail from Chrome 148 (rolling out next week). developer.chrome.com/blog/contain...

I really do think this has promise, it really can be super easy to implement (add a few attributes to forms, or hook into JavaScript functions you already have). It feels like working with the platform instead of inventing something new.

Also added the ability to add a custom robots.txt, scoped to either the origin you're testing, or all, based on an excellent suggestion from John McAlpin. tamethebots.com/tools/fetch-...

Couple of quick changes on my fetch & render tool: tamethebots.com/tools/fetch-..., you can now choose to disable JavaScript, so you can see what things like AI bots might see:

Goddamit. I guess I'll have to resubmit all these again.

If you like SEO, there is 1 day left for silly cheap Early Bird SearchNorwichXL tickets to hang out with 200+ SEOs and see some excellent speakers. If you don't like SEO, there is a free bar and that is still pretty cheap for that too. searchnorwich.org

Quick lunchtime fun play with WebMCP, seems remarkably simple to implement, at least for this simple case. Live on tamethebots.com/tools/cwv-hi..., but you'll need chrome canary / enable the flag etc: developer.chrome.com/blog/webmcp-... I can definitely see this being helpful in some cases

If your SEO isn't in your CI/CD, you’re playing on Hard Mode for no reason 💀 The most satisfying green checkmarks you’ll ever see. Who’s on this level yet? 📈

Also interesting they will/might pass what you say in the report over with the manual action.

Soft Navigations API getting closer! developer.chrome.com/blog/final-s...

Just published a new version of gsap-video-export (2.1.1) that has some minor housekeeping and adds an option to export the png frames skipping the video encoding step. @gsap-greensock.bsky.social github.com/workeffortwa...

New WordPress plugin from me :)

🆕 The 202603 Chrome User Experience (CrUX) release is now live on BigQuery! Check out the announcement post for the full info: groups.google.com/a/chromium.o... Highlights below 👇 🧵 1/9

🛠️ Free tool: A few people were asking about the tool I screenshot yesterday for exploring ChatGPT query fan outs, so I have popped it onto Cloudflare Pages for free for you at queryfan.com 🤓 You just need OAI API key.

For years, the performance ceiling in the browser has been clear: the CPU. WebGPU changes that. 🧵 It’s not a library or a framework. It’s a browser API that gives direct access to the device’s GPU, enabling a level of parallelism the CPU cannot match. #WebPerf #WebGPU

PSA Googlebot tries to render pages to understand what they look like, to better understand the value & context of your site's content. This requires that your JS & CSS files be crawlable. Don't block these files for Googlebot in robots.txt, if you want Google to understand your site optimally.

Lighthouse 13.1.0 is out, and brings a new audit, checking the baseline status of features used on the page. Release notes here: github.com/GoogleChrome... Or give it a spin in my fetch and render tool: tamethebots.com/tools/fetch-...

How To Use Standard HTML Video & Audio Lazy-Loading on the Web Today. Part 2 of my Squarespace Engineering blog series on the topic. Please enjoy!

SearchNorwichXL is happening on 24th September and I am stoked at the line up we've got 😍 Join us: searchnorwich.org

"Hi, I'm Johnny Knoxville, Welcome to JACKASS! Today we're using copilot professionally"

So proud of our team! RUMvision 2.0 is live - a total rewrite from the ground up. We're making web performance actionable so every click counts. New UI, API, and automated to do's (with fixes) on your real-time data. Happy but tired now 😉 www.rumvision.com/blog/launch-...

Another great episode and great to hear the work of @not-a-robot.com & @barkseo.bsky.social on @httparchive.org's Web Almanac referenced! After listening, go snack on the nutritious & delicious Page weight chapter: almanac.httparchive.org/en/2025/page...

Although I primarily designed this tool to diagnose losses in impressions, did you know you can be less depressing and enter a negative threshold to see URLs that have improved in impressions?

Hopefully just a glitch, but looks like blast from the past tripod sites are down now. www.google.com/search?q=sit...

We just added a Core Web Vitals geographic breakdown to the Core Web Vitals tech report when looking at a single technology httparchive.org/reports/tech... Many thanks to @alonko.bsky.social for contributing this!

Google now publishing the User-agents & IP ranges for Google-Agent, used for things like Project Mariner: developers.google.com/crawling/doc... (also interesting to see they are investigating web-bot-auth!) I've added this to my Real Googlebot IP? tool found here: tamethebots.com/tools/real-g...

Releasing .htaccess Punk—a Quick Helper to Check Redirects in .htaccess Files: Have you checked your .htaccess on broken redirects today?

Speed test results are now shared between speed.cloudflare.com and radar.cloudflare.com/speedtest. Detailed results are shown on Speed, while summary and country/network comparisons are shown on Radar, and users can now easily switch between the two views.

After accidentally announcing this a couple of days earlier than planned... suppose I'd better share this here too! The brilliant @dawnieando.bsky.social is speaking at the 'Comeback' Optmisey #SEO event on 23rd April. Grab a FREE ticket before they're all gone: optimisey.com/optimisey-me...

I like this proposal for a standardised machine readable format for publishing bot IP ranges.

Now more LLM crawlers publish their IP ranges, I've added a new tool that lets you spot check an IP address and see if it's a legit openAI/ ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude one: tamethebots.com/tools/real-l... to go along with the Googlebot IP range one.

Definitely missed a clickbait title opportunity of "Vampires Hate this One Simple Trick" headline here

Had a great time when I managed to get to one of these, @optimisey.com is awesome, and if you can get to Cambridge, I'm convinced you'd have a great time.

Starting with Chrome 145, DevTools now lets you throttle specific requests instead of the whole page. It’s the ideal way to test how your app handles a single slow asset or API call → goo.gle/4aP1Tcc

i saw the interactive xkcd on hackernews and decided to make it render a real npm graph it uses webcontainers to `npm i {pkg}`, then renders the bricks based on the dep tree scaled by disk size

Lots of misinformation still flying around our SEO space so I dug into some of the possible causes and the current category conflicts and wrote them up following my presentation at Women in Technical SEO. www.womenintechseo.com/knowledge/ge...

AI Crawlers and JavaScript​: Why LLMs Can't See Your Client-Rendered Content visively.com/kb/ai/ai-cra...

That deep satisfaction when you finally find the right combination of flags to stop chrome automatically 307 redirecting http to https, so your testing tool doesn't quite work how you want. --disable-features=HttpsFirstBalancedModeAutoEnable (You would very much not want to do this IRL)

Parsley HTML, tasty. No wait 12 parsecs? No, parsing. Another great episode.

Who cares about chips shortages when there's CSS? lyra.horse/x86css/

A Complete Guide to Bookmarklets, by @vale.rocks (@[email protected]): https://css-tricks.com/a-complete-guide-to-bookmarklets/ #guides #bookmarklets #javascript #linklists

Your political affiliations shouldn't affect your ability to see AI being positioned as a political weapon. The Pentagon is threatening Anthropic bc it's unwilling to lift restrictions on use for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons not-a-robot.com/blog/ai-poli...

Ever wanted a comprehensive guide to DevTools and debugging front ends? Check out this ebook that Lala Hakobyan just launched: github.com/lala-hakobya... I’m impressed!!

I have left so many ecommerce sites because I am trying to look at products and they force me to try and play some game to win a voucher code.

I've encountered many applications with poor INP due to long tasks that do not yield control to the browser I've written a guide with measurable examples comparing setTimeout, queueMicrotask, scheduler.postTask. It includes snippets to audit your projects joanleon.dev/en/yield-to-... #WebPerf

This is a neat approach to doing YouTube façades with zero JavaScript. frontendmasters.com/blog/perform...