Posted by Remy Housley on December 1st, 2023It’s time for another roundup of marketing, social media, and digital marketing news! While updates often get quiet around the holidays, there was a lot going on over the last month:
WordPress 6.4 is here!
WordPress 6.4 dropped on November 7th, 2023 (and subsequently, WordPress 6.4.1 released on November 9th, 2023) with a variety of new features, new fixes, and lots more. You can find the details for what’s included in the latest WordPress release using the field guide but some highlights are:
- Introduction of Block hooks
- Introduction of admin notice functions
- Attachment pages now off by default for new installs
And of course, lots more. Many updates are regarding the semi-new idea of full-site editing which utilizes Gutenberg Blocks instead of PHP templates that classic themes use. Keep watching as full-site editing continues to grow in its robustness and usefulness.
A Big Shakeup at OpenAI Finally (We Think?) Settling Down
There was a chaotic week or so in late November at OpenAI, the developers of ChatGPT, when the CEO was ousted by the board, two different interim CEOs were announced, and almost all major staff threatened to quit. Just before the holiday, Sam Altman, the original CEO, was restored to his position; no news yet on how this might continue to impact OpenAI’s projects, but hopefully this bodes well.
Bluesky goes public
Bluesky is preparing to launch its public version of the site, which doesn’t require you to log in to view posts. As a general note, Bluesky posts have always been public with no way to make them restricted, so please be careful what you are posting. Bluesky is also notoriously devoid of DMs, so make sure to exchange email addresses prior to having private conversations on the platform. This will be doubly so as we expect search engines to begin indexing Bluesky public pages.
Google Reviews Update: With More to Come
In November, Google announced an update to their reviews—the third this year. Perhaps more importantly, they stated that they would no longer provide information about updates and improvements to their reviews systems. This serves as a good reminder that even if you have great reviews, you will benefit from continuing to invite reviews from happy customers—as the reviews system continues to be updated, the older reviews will likely have less “value” according to Google.
Squarespace offers AI crawler opt-out
Squarespace recently and very quietly offered a new setting to its users with which they can choose to opt their site out of crawlers commonly used by AI/LLMs. By toggling this setting, disallows will be added to the robots.txt file of your Squarespace site, kindly telling well-behaved crawlers to “go away.”
