<div class="rss-widget"><ul><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://www.wptavern.com/wpsessions-to-give-away-12-full-year-scholarships' title=' Brian Richards has announced that he is giving away 12 full year scholarships. Winners will be given access to every new session published in 2014. According to Brian, that’s at least $360 in live, personal training. Winners are chosen every day at 12PM Eastern Time. To enter the drawing, you’ll need to tell Brian how the scholarship will benefit you or someone you know. I want to hear about why you (or someone you know) would benefit from a full-year scholarship to WPSessions.com. What do you want to learn? How will you put this knowledge to use? What more can you do with another year of steady and continued growth under your belt? Tell me all this and more in a comment on this post, and if I like your story you get the next 12 months of sessions for free. WPSessions.com provides monthly, high quality presentations from experts in the WordPress community. Every presentation is broadcast live to viewers around the web and recorded for indefinite long-term viewing. Each session focuses on a single topic, bringing together 3 different presenters to discuss the topic’s many facets at an extremely low-cost per event. To learn more about Brian Richards and what WPSessions is all about, check out this interview from June of 2013. '>WPTavern: WPSessions To Give Away 12 Full Year Scholarships</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://www.wptavern.com/speed-up-wordpress-by-using-the-wordpress-com-cdn-for-javascript-files' title='photo credit: Tc Morgan – ccHere’s a quick performance tip for self-hosted WordPress sites. WordPress loads a number of scripts from its /wp-includes/ directory, depending on what you have active on your site. Use WordPress.com Libraries is a new plugin, created by Automattician and plugin developer Ben Lobaugh. Once installed, it automatically switches the URL on built-in WordPress Javascript files to serve them from the WordPress.com CDN instead. Rather than taxing your local server, you offload those requests to WordPress.com, thereby decreasing load time and bandwidth consumption.  Here’s a quick sample of a site’s scripts before installing the plugin:      The plugin automatically changes the script URLs in use to call the ones hosted on WordPress.com:      Don’t look for a settings panel, as it doesn’t come with any options. You simply install the plugin, activate it and you’re good to go. Everything happens automatically in the background. As a general warning, make sure to check through your site after installing this in case anything has broken. In my tests everything worked fine but if you’re running an older version of WordPress, it may not work predictably. The plugin is still in development and will likely receive updates to improve it over time. It’s tough to say how much of a performance boost you’ll get and how much bandwidth you’ll save by installing this plugin, because it depends on which scripts you have active on your website and how heavy your traffic is. However, every small bit helps, especially if you’re not already using a CDN. Install the Use WordPress.com Libraries plugin for free from the WordPress plugin directory.'>WPTavern: Speed Up WordPress By Using the WordPress.com CDN for Javascript Files</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://www.wptavern.com/o2-wordpress-plugin-expected-to-be-available-in-early-2014' title=' In 2008, Automattic created a WordPress theme entitled Prologue. A year after its launch, Automattic released P2 to take the place of Prologue. P2 was a revolutionary theme as it enabled communication to happen in near real-time and arranged comments so that they were equally as important as blog posts. From 2009 to 2013, P2 handled 80% of the communication that took place within the company. Earlier this year at WordCamp San Francisco, Beau Lebens who works at Automattic announced the successor to P2. It won’t be a theme. Instead, it will be a plugin entitled o2.  o2 is named after the section of the Automattic creed that states “I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company“. o2 was built from the ground up around the idea that communication is oxygen. In this light, the features of o2 make total sense:  Intended to be used within a network Focused on the client side or frontend Native infinite scroll Improved real time commenting Cross-site Search (Search multiple o2 instances within a network) Cross-posting (Post on more than one o2 site at the same time) Keyword + Name Notifications Shared Tags Email Integration (Post and comment by email) Drag and drop media uploading Jetpack Integration  While o2 is a plugin it will ship with a default theme called Breathe based on the Underscores starter theme. o2 is being built as a platform so developers will be able to create plugins and themes to extend its capabilities. The Progress Of o2 One of the downsides to o2 is that it will initially not contain any of the network functionality that was mentioned in Beau Lebens WordCamp session. When I asked Beau to clarify, he responded: The initial version is not using websockets, but the AJAX polling is much more efficient and reliable (and accurate) than it ever was in P2. We’ll still be playing with websockets at some point, but it hasn’t proven to be critical to making a great experience thus far, so we’ve pushed it back a bit as a priority. Instead, the commenting system will be an up to date version of P2 which gives us a better foundation to work on top of. The initial announcement was on August 8th, 2013 but o2 has yet to be released. I reached out to Beau Lebens to get a status update on the project and asked when we might see it become available for public use. He told me that the team is very close to starting a controlled beta or alpha on WordPress.com. Testing will continue into the new year. Once the initial testing program concludes, we’ll likely see something made available for self installed WordPress users. We can expect this to happen sometime around February or March of 2014. Beau Lebens points out that these release dates are very rough estimates, and it depends largely on how things go with the initial trial group. Watch Beau Lebens at WordCamp San Francisco 2013 Announce The o2 Plugin '>WPTavern: o2 WordPress Plugin Expected To Be Available In Early 2014</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://www.wptavern.com/prettypress-plugin-reinvents-wordpress-post-editing-with-live-preview' title='The WordPress post editing experience is one of the next major features that will be evolving to meet the needs of modern publishers. We don’t know what that’s going to look like yet, but there’s a trend emerging where everyone is taking a stab at re-imagining the post editor. Free and commercial plugins are popping up all over the place, each with a different take on improving the publishing experience. PrettyPress is one that landed in the WordPress plugin repository over the weekend. The plugin offers a live front-end preview of your post while you’re typing.  PrettyPress Live Preview Essentially, it’s a Ghost-style editor without the Markdown. You could, however, install another plugin to add Markdown capabilities. PrettyPress aims to streamline WordPress publishing by simplifying the editing layout. It removes the distraction of having to switch back and forth between the frontend and backend to preview post formatting.  While testing the plugin, I appreciated the fact that it doesn’t completely take over the post/page editor. Instead, it places a “Launch PrettyPress” button in the sidebar of the editor so that users can select when to activate the side-by-side screen. The plugin uses Javascript and jQuery to create the side-by-side layout with live preview and the PrettyPress developer notes that larger posts may have some performance issues. This is one aspect of the plugin that they plan to improve in the future. If you like this style of editing experience and you want to test it out, download the PrettyPress plugin for free through your WordPress dashboard.'>WPTavern: PrettyPress Plugin Reinvents WordPress Post Editing With Live Preview</a></li><li><a class='rsswidget' href='http://ma.tt/2013/12/lean-startup-talk/' title=' I spoke with Sarah Millstein at the Lean Startup Conference earlier in the week. After a bit of intro we talk about how Automattic iterates, approaches hiring, and management.'>Matt: Lean Startup Talk</a></li></ul></div>