Tag: WordPress

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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.

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Event #51: “Build a Community with WordPress and Social Media”, by Luna Carmona

Luna started by giving Mark Z of FB as a good model for communication. Someone to be trusted! I guess this indicated I was not the target audience;-)

I did enjoy the talk. Luna covered the way she had used social media to support building a community around Achieve More Scotland. This is a small but valuable organisation. In a couple of years they have greatly increased online engagement.

Takeaways:

  • try multiple channels don’t be scared of dropping the ones that have little engagement.
  • Meet community where it exists using the channels folk already use.
  • Twitter in the morning, Instagram in the middle of the day and Facebook in the evening.
  • Try for community rather than followers.
  • Respond quickly.

There are lessons for online educational communities here.

There wasn’t much specific WordPress information I wonder if some IndieWeb tech could help?

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Reposted PressED Conf - A tweeting WordPress conference on Twitter (Twitter)
“Hey #PressEd people. We're aiming to make the next PressEd twitter conferenxe as equitable as possible. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions. RTs gratefully appreciated”

I enjoyed PressED, #pressedconf18,  last time, looking forward to seeing the rerun with extra equitably.

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Replied to INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
Wow @dshanske back at it and already addressed the bugs in last release of post-kind plugin. @mrkndvs @johnjohnston is out. Please update to  3.1.1 and let us know if you bump into issues. #IndieWeb #digped #literacies If you read the change log Dave tackled a ton of issues in 3.1.0. Always looking...

in reply to: Greg manual u-in-reply-to

Hi Greg, both Arron:

⚠ Version 3.1.1 · Issue #230 · dshanske/indieweb-post-kinds

and I:

3.1.1 text Array in quotes and Name · Issue #231 · dshanske/indieweb-post-kinds

Have let David know about a couple of problems we are having. This post being an example!

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Replied to Searching for my #IndieWeb WordPress Exit Plan by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
It maybe some time before I start th move from WordPress. This is about developing the exit plan. Not jumping from the plane while I try to put on the chute.

Hi Greg,

I’ve had my own struggles with getting IndieWeb working here too. I’ve a fair bit I still need to sort out.

I wish I had a bit more time to play/work with this stuff, I don’t think I’d fix any problems but I might get things here working more to my liking.

I do think that WordPress is the best chance of getting the IndieWeb working for the rest of us. The other approaches seem to technically daunting for me.

On getting webmentions to work I found the WP Crontrol plugin useful. It lets you see the webmentions queueing up and you can run them manually. That might be worth a punt.

Anyway, good luck and I’ll be very interested to see what you come up with.