Hello there 👋 We’re kicking off our new monthly product update series, where we publish changes we’re making to the Rest of World website and other Products. Here’s a look at our latest releases, upcoming updates, and some interesting stats.

🚀 Releases of Note

Homepage Showcase Improvements

The Showcase (a.k.a. Editor’s Choice) module on the homepage now includes a shuffle function to randomly display selected projects every time we publish a new homepage curation (which we publish daily!)

We’ve also introduced a pinning feature that allows us to promote projects in the first position.

Webpage section titled 'Editor's picks' featuring visually diverse articles including an illustration labeled 'Digital Divinity' with a sun and traditional figures, alongside images of a smartphone interface, a person on a motorcycle, and various graphic elements or screens, all set against a bright blue background.

Locator Map Enhancements

We’ve updated the Locator Map function to use Datawrapper’s Locator Maps, providing a global view and supporting multiple markers. We use Locator Maps when a story takes place in a city or country that many of our Western readers are not familiar with.

Image Performance Upgrades

All of our images are now rendered via Fastly CDN, so we’re hoping this will improve the image performance and load speeds for our international readers. We’ve also removed our custom lazy-load function and are using browser-based lazy-loading. We’ll be evaluating which approach is better in the coming weeks.

Brand Refresh Rollout

We’ve rolled out our new brand colors across all pages on the site. You’ll now see our new Cobalt blue across all of our site pages in bright mode, and dark mode.

A webpage titled 'Tech Giants' featuring a blue and purple graphic with documents and a passport illustration, and an orange arrow pointing to a news article about an H-1B crackdown affecting Big Tech. The page includes navigation links and article summaries.

Support Us Callout

This month we’ve launched a fundraising campaign where we are encouraging our readers to give monthly to support our independent journalism. As part of that push we’re experimenting with a new callout below our stories and informs readers on roughly how many articles they’ve read over a 3 month period. Watch your article count grow, and if you’re so inclined, consider a small monthly donation to support nonprofit journalism.

Additional Contributors can be tagged WordPress

Any existing contributors in the CMS can now be linked as Additional Contributors on a post, ensuring stories they’ve worked on appear on their Author pages.

📈 Product Stats

Some interesting things we learned in the last month…

63% of users visited us using the Chrome browser in the last 30 days. 18.6% used Safari, 8% used Firefox and 2% used Edge.

0.18% of page views were in dark mode in the last 90 days. Did you know we have dark mode? Check it out!

🤔 Questions and Feedback

We’d love to hear more from you, our readers, about what features you like (or don’t like) on our site. Feel free to drop us an email at hello@restofworld.org if you have any feedback, questions or suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. 

Catch you next month!