Kolakube Updates

After rolling out the redesign of the MD blog I have since turned my attention to updating old content. Finally having years worth of articles organized into very specific categories has given the blog a whole new life and now needs the cleaning it deserves.

Part of how I am breaking down the time I spend updating as many as 100+ older posts is to first add a new set of standardized featured images.

Today I spent about 20 minutes using a Photoshop template to add entirely new featured images to the first page of the MD Features blog category. Scrolling through and finding posts is now much more enjoyable, and extremely straightforward.

Some takeaways from today’s work:

• Rather than creating different images for each post, make a standardized graphic that can quickly be modified to each post.
• If I update at least one category page per day with a new featured image (10 posts in 20 minutes), I can be done in 9 days.
• There is loads of content still relevant today that I wrote about MD years ago, and plenty of information I see that needs to be updated!

I hope you have all enjoyed these fleeting summer months. I am entering a new era in my own life after these hot months of personal growth, adventures, death, and collaboration. I realize the weight of that sentence and I only hope you are reminded of what this summer has been like for you.

MD is always moving.

Challenge: if you haven’t found your voice online yet, you haven’t used MD right.

Let’s play a game this month called #NoCacheNovember. The goal is to find out if your site can survive a whole month without a cache plugin enabled. Cache plugins improve site performance but tend to cover up big mistakes that lie under-the-hood (and make it hard to see new changes!). What will you learn about the health your site by disabling it for a month? Find out during #NoCacheNovember!

Get excited for Monday because I am releasing to you a new Dropin that will immediately allow you to create new kinds of rich content pages you may only currently see a few top marketing blogs doing. I consider this Dropin as one of those things that is slightly ahead of the curve, but will make sense once you see it. See you Monday morning!

Officially running the MD4.9.1 beta version on the Marketers Delight site! Updates have been going smoothly and I am definitely releasing it this week.

MD4.9.1 is a big performance update which really cleans up some of MD’s tiny performance woes on the frontend of your website.

For starters, all of your theme and child theme CSS can now be combined into a single CSS file.

Most excitingly, all of MD’s JavaScript features have been condensed to an ultra efficient and tiny 7kb JS file with no extra libraries like jQuery to load. That means powerful features like popups, share buttons, menu toggles, and others are delivered in the fastest way possible.

Finally, the WebFont loader has been improved to further eliminate the “Flash of Invisible Text.”

Very exciting stuff here, show you the full release this week!

Well… here goes posting the first post to the revamped version of the Stream! You’re looking at a totally revamped design, a new share button set, the mighty LIKE button, and a new profile header.

The first version of the Stream was a weekend inspiration that delivered a solid concept with an unclear design. While that never bothered me as I knew I would develop this feature, the excitement eventually grew intolerable and I had to get this next iteration out.

Those of you who used the first version of The Stream: well done for catching on to what a beautiful feature this will be for your site. Now you get to experience the next step and build your own thoughts stream and website into something more in 2019.

If you’re reading this now, this is a test of the very first version of Marketers Delight 4.9.2 on a live site and let me tell you that all is going well! MD4.9.2 is bigger than just the Stream, and in the next few days I will reveal all and release it to you too.