Boo. That was me attempting to get into the spirit of Halloween. It’s October and that means it’s “spooky” season, “pumpkin spiced latte” season or “decorative gourd” season if you’re in the US. For most of us however it’s simply just Halloween… In other parts of the world you may have celebrated Diwali, or are about to celebrate All Souls Day or Día de los Muertos.

Whatever you’re celebrating this October, please take a moment to celebrate what the Product team have been up to this past month:

What we did 🚀

AI Narrations Plugin

You may (or may not) have read that we open-sourced our AI Narrations plugin for WordPress. That means anyone using WordPress can now tap into the same functionality we use on our own site to generate the AI-powered read-throughs you see on most of our stories.

The plugin currently works only with OpenAI’s text-to-speech API, which does mean you’ll need to create an account and give them your money, but the plugin itself is completely free to use. 

If you know of a better model (cheaper, more performant, or more environmentally friendly), you can either submit a pull request to extend the functionality or raise a Github issue or request that we add support. In fact, if you have any other suggestions, or improvements to make, we’ll gladly welcome them – just drop us an email. 

Why did we open source the plugin? We have benefitted from other people’s plugins in the past, and earlier this year, we set a team goal to give back to the wider journalism community by being more transparent and open-sourcing some of our own work. This is the first step in that direction and we’re learning as we go. 

Article discussing Jack, a virtual K-pop idol in a cyberpunk battle suit, interacting in the metaverse.

Mobile Masthead on articles

We’re always looking for new ways to improve the reading experience. To that end, we’re about to introduce a sticky masthead on articles on mobile. As you scroll through a story, and into the next dynamically loaded one, you’ll have quick access to our homepage and other parts of the site through the navigation. We figured this was a good way to help anyone who might feel trapped down an infinite-scroll rabbit hole.

We’re still testing this, and have discovered an incredibly irritating bug in Safari on IOS 26 (if you have a solution please let us know) but we’re hoping to get this out imminently. 

Whether this ends up being a helpful navigation feature or a hindrance to the reading experience remains to be seen, but we’re curious to find out. We’ll be adding the masthead on mobile as an experiment for a set period and will be tracking how readers interact with it, before deciding whether to make it permanent. 

Recirculation on search and 404 pages

Can’t find the story you are looking for? Landed on a page that doesn’t exist? If you’re one of the unfortunate souls who ends up in one of these digital dead ends, fear not, you can now browse our most popular stories instead.

We’ve added a Most Popular recirculation module to 404 and empty search pages, a small but effective way to help lost readers find some interesting content that others have enjoyed on site. 

A website displaying a 'Page Not Found' message with a creative fortune and lucky numbers.

Even more accessibility improvements

The battle for greater accessibility continues unabated. It’s an ongoing process of small, persistent improvements and constant testing.

We use this WordPress plugin to generate alt-text for images. (I’m not plugging it, but after testing a few options, I can confirm this one’s excellent, and it’s free to use, though you’ll need to pay for OpenAI’s services.) While the plugin generates descriptive text using ChatGPT 4.0, our editorial team will review the text and check for accuracy. During a recent accessibility audit, we noticed that the generated text was often very long and the recommendation is that alt-text should not extend beyond 125 characters. 

Like any good plugin, it has hooks we can leverage, so Anna used a hook to add a prompt to keep the text under 125 characters. Now the text is descriptive yet concise, exactly what good alt text should be. If you use this plugin or are considering using it, you can see her solution here. 

What we learned

Dynamic page views

You may notice that on the majority of our articles we automatically load the next article recently published in that region. We call this our dynamic page load experience. We track page views and dynamic page views periodically, and have found that dynamic page views have accounted for 18% of our total article page views this year to date, a fairly consistent number. 

We also track what we call Engaged Page Views, these are page views where readers dwell for at least 10 seconds on the page. Engaged page views accounted for roughly 67% of our total page view number on articles this year to date. 

A worker in a blue jacket holds a bag of sand in an industrial setting with racks behind them.
Topics are displayed just below our main masthead on the homepage.

Topics on mobile on homepage masthead

Since we added links to our “beats” (similar to topics) to the homepage on mobile in late July, we’ve seen a 26.5% increase in clicks on the masthead on mobile devices, and on average a 72% increase in page views on beat pages on mobile compared to the previous period. This has been a pretty simple way to amplify key areas of our coverage, and help readers discover more content that’s relevant or interesting to them. 

Coming soon

We’re going to be launching our pop-up store again for a few weeks in November. We’re adding a couple of new items to the product line to tie in with the holiday and gift-giving season, so stay tuned for new merchandise from next week!

Finally…

We’re nice!

Please feel free to shoot us an email at hello@restofworld.org if you’ve got any ideas, questions, requests for features or feedback for us. We love hearing from you.