Tag: WordPress

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Hi Chris,

Thanks for the listen, it is not often I am accused of keeping things on track;-)

I’ve though about this a wee bit. Doing the whole thing via the indieweb would be beautiful but it raises the barrier for participation very high. Setting up WordPress for indieweb is certainly doable but the number of folk interested in WordPress and education that would do this would be low. Given the notion of accessibility I think this is more something to aim for long term?

I had though of the idea of running the whole thing on p2, I’ve set up a couple of short term p2 blogs for Education Scotland to go with public events. You can set p2 to allow subscribers to post and set a widget to allow self registration. In our set up this registration was limited to Glow Scotland users. This of course loses the indieweb bit. Unfortunately p2 is pretty horrible on mobile.

I hope you get a proposal together, it would be great to have an indieWeb presence virtually at the conference. I expect you would post your presentation tweets via your site. I did consider that last time when I presented but was worried about timing and appearance on twitter which I’ve not really got my head round.

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The new WordPress editor is now official. It comes with a new editor Gutenberg. I’ve tested Gutenberg on and off for a while, mostly worrying about iOS in particular iPads. That has improved steadily.

My concern is pupils using Glow Blogs will find the new editor more complicated.

I am somewhat relived that pasting from Apple Notes on an iPad works fine in the blocks editor, paragraphs generating new blocks. Adding images above or below a particular block seems a little footery but nothing pupils will not handle 1.

Now WordPress 5 is out I need to think about my own use. I don’t usually write in the web editor, preferring to either cut and paste from a text editor or post via micro.blog or xml-rpc. TextMate has a lovely blogging bundle, and I use drafts and shortcuts on iOS.

I’ve installed WordPress 5 on a couple of other sites, and had a quick play. Posting from TextMate, via xml-rpc put the content in a classic block if Gutenberg is enabled.

I’ve also enabled the classic editor plugin on these sites and this one. The ability to toggle back and forward between editors seems like a good idea, but on the sites I’ve tried it has mostly failed 2. This would be a good way to introduce the editor to Glow Blogs users, start with the classic editor, add in the ability to toggle to Gutenberg. I do worry that having two editors will lead to folk having problems or getting confused. I am not looking forward to updating the Glow Blogs help. This is probably a bit in the future as we should wait and see how Gutenberg is going on multi-sites before upgrading.

My other personal worry is that at the moment the indieweb post_kinds plugin is not compatible with Gutenberg. This is compounded by the fact I can’t update that plugin on this site at the moment. I am presuming that things will get shaken out and improve over the next year or two.

My plan is now to upgrade this blog to WP 5 but use the classic editor, waiting to see how the indieweb plugins evolve. I’ll continue writing in TextMate, drafts and the like while I keep half an eye on developments.

  1. I was pleasantly surprised watching a pupil happily collapsing meta-boxes to get her e-portfolio tags the other day. I had at some point shown the class how to expand them after they accidentally collapsed them, but not talked about it in any depth. I suspect pupils will adapt to new interfaces easier that I will. ↩
  2. I will test this a bit more and try to see if it is something I can report. Update version 1.2 of the classic Editor has fixed this for me.↩

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I started to write the odd weekly recap of my view of micro.blog and it misfired in a very confusing, to me, way. The post went through to the micro.blog app as a titled post. I had kept the character count down to under 280. The post was a status post. It should have appeared in all of its glory on micro.blog.

I looked at it for a while and then headed over to the micro.blog slack community to bother @manton. Only after that I looked again and thought it through.

My script that removes titles in RSS from my status posts if the post <280 chars didn’t account for emoji being counted as multiple chars. It wasn’t till I’d posted to slack that I figured this out.

I’ve figure out how to work round this, replacing emoji with one character using a slight change to this function from @mdhughes. I’ll probably have to wait until next week to post another recap and see if it really will work.

I’ve updated this gist: functions that have do with micro.blog and microblogging that live in my child theme’s functions.php

It is getting time for a rethink of how the tubes are connected here, I need to simplify a little I think.