WordPress performance, pineapple on pizza, mad king, marketing calendar, searchquake, Whisk, expert tips, TikTok ban and cooking trends. Like many of us, I won’t be doing a lot of work in the next ten days so that I can enjoy the holidays. What I typically do is a lot of thinking and planning about what I’ll do in the new year. I already have some ideas in mind that need to be fleshed out before I can act on them. Something else to do early in the new year will be migrating some Web sites, including this one, to new hosting. I’ll share more about these projects in the future. Until then, check out this week’s news below including more madness from Matt Mullenweg.

• Read this post on the Web Design Solutions Unleashed site!
• Read Tech News Digest for December 20, 2024 on Graphics Unleashed!

• Getting a taste of your own medicine: Threat actor MUT-1244 targets offensive actors, leaking hundreds of thousands of credentials
• WordPress 6.7 Performance Improvements
• WordPress Photo Directory Gets A Revamp
• WooCommerce in 2025: Building a platform for the future
• WPExperts Acquires Advanced File Manager Plugin
• AI for Site Audit #3, new TOC and FAQ blocks and more – SEOPress 8.4
• We’ve Upgraded The Events Calendar and Event Tickets Plus with Onboarding Wizard and Booking Fees
• ‘Support Inclusion in Tech’ Expands Grant Program to North and South America
• WordPress Vs. Squarespace – Which One Is Better?

• What we learned about marketing in 2024
• Event Marketing: The Ultimate Guide That Cost $400k to Make
• Brand Monitoring: 3 Must-Track Areas for Success
• Featured Calendar: Evergreen Chamber Orchestra
• Marketing Calendar 2025 With Template To Plan Your Content

• Google Announces Search Updates Powered By Gemini 2.0
• Searchquake: Consumers Now Consider ChatGPT A Real Google Alternative
• Bing Search Updates: Faster, More Precise Results
• Ask An SEO: How To Move From Page 2 To Top Positions
• 8 Metrics To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Internal Linking Strategy

• The new Sandisk logo follows a controversial recent design trend
• This new Google AI tool lets you easily generate images from other photos – no prompt required
• Adobe Raises Photoshop, Lightroom Prices for Monthly Plans
• “The design community has turned a corner”: Monotype on the rise of AI in the creative industries
• Google’s new AI tool Whisk uses images as prompts
• 15 AI Content Creation Tools to Add to Your Tech Stack
• How to Use an AI Voice Changer, and What It Offers Content Creators
• I saw the magical Reflection Removal tool teased at Adobe Max – and it’s now reached Photoshop
• 17 Expert Tips For Content Writing In 2025
• The best (and worst) logos of 2024
• Hiroshi Nagai’s Art Pop style inspired these sunny nostalgic visions of Singapore
• The best Christmas logos: What happened when brands got festive

• Bluesky and Decentralization
• Instagram Quietly Rolls Out Scheduled DMs—But There’s a Catch
• U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear challenge to TikTok ban
• YouTube is helping high-profile actors and athletes monetize their AI likenesses
• Meta’s Threads has grown to 300 million users
• YouTube Promises Crackdown on Videos With ‘Egregious Clickbait’ Titles

Each week we’ll share a meme that we find thought provoking or just plain funny.

• How to Consult an Onion Oracle
• Eating Spaghetti by the Fistful Was Once a Neapolitan Street Spectacle
• C.S. Lewis’s Greatest Fiction Was Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight
• I’m Lovin’ It: Exploiting McDonald’s APIs to hijack deliveries and order food for a penny
• 6 Chefs Predict 2025 Cooking Trends: AI Recipes, African Grains and Pickling

If you see some important news that you feel we should share with our readers, please let us know and we’ll consider including it in our next post.

Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash