A Quick Update: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Hi everyone, it’s been a few months since I last posted something. So I felt you guys deserved a little update, or explanation for my absence.

No worries. I’m not dead, I didn’t jump ship, I didn’t lose my passion and/or motivation. Nothing like that.

The Good

As you might’ve read in some of my previous posts, I’ve had a lot to celebrate in the past few months. The 9th of July our daughter Emma was born and October 13th we got the keys to our beautiful new home. Meanwhile, September 1st, I opened up my own business: Fast FW Press.

It’s a lot. A lot of awesome. But still, a lot.

The first few months with newborns are tough, but Emma is growing fast and with her being at a sitter twice a week now, Daddy is finally getting some time back for himself: WordPress!

That being said, the new house still requires a lot of work. It used to belong to an old lady who was perfectly satisfied with her 80’s style living room, kitchen, bathroom, toilet, etc. So, a lot of updates are required! Pimp my house, so to speak.

Speaking of updates, let’s save the Bad for last and use this bridge to cross over to the Ugly.

The Ugly

Shortly before my ‘leave of absence’, I released v4 of the OMGF saga. It introduced a bunch of new features, the most important ones being:

• An Automatic mode, which allows you to stop worrying about the optimization and let OMGF pick up and optimize fonts whenever a visitor loads one of your pages containing (unoptimized) Google Fonts.
• Increased Performance, where OMGF v3 first removed all the clutter — containing the Google Fonts — and then inserted the newly generated stylesheet, v4 injects the newly generated files directly into WordPress’ enqueuing system, overwriting the clutter with the good stuff!
• A more User Friendly font management overview, which allows you to easily unload/preload detected Google Fonts and introduced a more convenient way to undo changes.

V4 also dropped one feature: the custom font installer. For two reasons:

• From day one, I received complaints for OMGF being ‘too complicated’,
• It contained a bunch of legacy code and was standing in the way of OMGF being able to stay on par with newer WordPress and PHP versions.

It was a bumpy release, to say the least, and the first version contained a bunch of bugs.

For some reason this led some of you to believe that I introduced those bugs on purpose, or I removed features from the free version to push the Pro version.

Seriously, WTF!?

To those people I just want to say: Please go see a shrink, because you need to deal with your paranoia.

Before v4, I rarely received bad reviews for OMGF. Since the v4 release I’ve had 9 (!) bad reviews — and a bunch of emails and comments — all saying that I’ve become a greedy, money grubbing, unprofessional, sad sack of a person.

Well, thanks. And fuck you.

Yes, I’ve been starting to monetize OMGF and CAOS. For one very clear reason: I want to make WordPress plugin development and blogging about Speed Optimization my fulltime job.

I don’t want to rip people off. Duh…

To those people, who took the time to accuse and insult me, I want to say: next time, when you’re writing a review, comment, support ticket or email, just realise that an actual, real human being is going to read that. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face. You don’t know what the other person’s going through.

Which brings me to The Bad.

The Bad

While we are raising our beautiful baby, fixing up our beautiful home and reading ugly reviews, life happens.

Let’s just say life takes interesting turns sometimes.

My mother was taken into the ER twice a few weeks ago, my grandmother suddenly died last week and a few days ago, my uncle had a stroke.

My mother’s OK. She’s still under supervision by a doctor. My uncle, however, not so much.

These are trying times, to say the least. Please bear with me, while I’m working my ass off to get everything back on track.

Thank you for your time. See you around!