Classic Block

More strange stuff . . .

/ Tony / 6 Comments

I am currently Home Alone. Mrs H has gone away for a few days, with her sister and father, to a cottage in North Yorkshire. I don’t like that kind of holiday, in fact, these days I don’t really like holidays. So here I am, the ‘saddo’ supposedly ‘enjoying my space’ (whatever that means.)

My sleep pattern does not exist. Some nights I can sleep for seven hours uninterrupted, but other nights it’s three hours then four or five hours of dozing sleep. The kind of sleep where you don’t realise you have slept, but time has moved on.

Well, last night was one of those nights! I staggered off to bed at around 11:45 (wife away, don’t forget) and was soon asleep. I assume I was soon asleep as I don’t remember being awake for long.

At around 3:30am I awoke. Unusually, I still felt sleepy, so after a quick visit to the bathroom, I snuggled down to sleep. After a few moments but could have been longer, I suddenly realised that the room was getting lighter. Sitting up, I quickly noticed that the Amazon Echo Dot that we have in the bedroom had somehow activated and the room was filled with a blue light. It lasted no more than ten seconds, but it was quite disturbing. I spent the next 30 minutes or so, trying to think if I had mentioned the ‘Alexa’ word in my sleep. Very disturbing!

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You may recall, I had a cause to contact WP support over an issue I had. I’m told that the issue has been passed on to the developers. I have now discovered another issue.

I decided that I would like to change the theme I use for my blog. I’ve had this one (Independent Publisher 2) for a couple of years now, and I thought I needed to have a refresh. Endless scrolling followed, but there was a problem! I seemed to be unable to preview a large number of the themes available.

I thought at first the issue was with the ‘free themes’ (I’m not paying any more for this.) But no! The issue affected most of the paid themes too! So I contacted Support! I pay for it so they might as well earn it.

I got a reply the next day (which was good service, I thought). It seems that my current theme is a “Classic” theme. Most of the themes are what they like to call “Block” themes. Support explained, clumsily I thought, that the ‘preview’ only worked properly for ‘Classic’ themes if I was previewing a ‘Classic’ theme. I needed to be using a ‘Block’ theme to preview ‘Block’ themes.

This has also gone to the developers, but as the ‘Happiness Engineer’ explained, they didn’t think there was any chance of it being changed or fixed.

A little bit of Classic

/ Tony / 1 Comment

Screenshot 2020-12-14 160100I recently had a brief (very brief) discussion with an ex-colleague, about using the Classic Block. I know when I post using Word as my editor, the post can be saved as draft and that when edited before final publishing, the post opens up in a Classic Block. But a ex-work colleague suggested that it is a bit of a halfway house between the Classic Editor and the Block Editor, and that I shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

I had a short flirt with the Classic Block when it first Word-Processor.pngraised its head, but it was nothing serious and I deleted the post without publishing it. The main aim was to understand the idea behind it. I now understand a lot more and thought I would have a play around and see what mess I could come up with.

I have to admit, it seems a little better that the full Block business, Screenshot 2020-12-14 161255but there are a few little niggles that would help it on its way.  A way of being able to move an image around the post would be great. I don’t think it would be too difficult to include a Full Justification button, which would help when keeping your work to certain style. It would certainly be useful if the WEBP image format could be used. I’ve recently found that for many images WEBP comes in at about half the file size of a JPEG (or JPG). Helpful if you use larger images.

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Lastly … does anyone actually call the Block Editor,  “Gutenberg” ? Whenever I hear the word, I usually think about the internet book resource Project Gutenberg. Just a wondering.

Word Blog Post Test

/ Tony / 9 Comments

This is my 2nd attempt at testing Word as a blog post editor. Unfortunately, the Blog template does not support tags. However, if the post is uploaded as draft and then edited, tags can be added then. It should be noted though, that post will open as a ‘Classic Block’ unless the Classic editor is used. Formatting seems to work fine, but as I found out recently, the font displayed depends on the font supported by the chosen WordPress theme. Also fully justified text is not available unless the ‘Paragraph’ option is selected. The classic ‘Shift +Alf + J’ does not appear to work in the template.

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This is made with Microsoft Word

/ Tony / 14 Comments

I am still looking to find a better way to write a post, without using the WordPress Block Editor. I have given up on using Open Live Writer which was billed as the direct Open Source replacement for Windows Live Writer. There has been no work improvement on the software and recently has stopped working with Google Blogger. I don’t use Blogger much, but it was good to have an alternative.

I decided to have a go with Microsoft Word. I’ve wanting to try for a while, but it seems from what I have heard, that it is not a good place to blog. I have to agree with some points, that it is not the easiest of editors to get used to. For one, there is no way to add tags to a post. I scoured the internet for an answer and the only thing I could come up with is to post as a draft, then edit in WordPress to add tags. So that is what I have tried here and have discovered that it is quite feasible to this, although it does take more time and the post ends up being edited as a Classic Block! Now is that good news? And will WordPress keep the Classic Block in the future?

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Another thing that I have found with the Block Editor which annoys me, is the placement of images. In the old Classic Editor, I could place an image into a text paragraph at more or less the position (left or right-aligned) anywhere in that paragraph using the word-wrap feature to wrap the text around that image. Which meant that the image could be, for example, two lines down from the top of the paragraph and two lines up from the bottom of that same paragraph. This does not happen in the Block Editor. The image can be left or right-aligned, but word-wrap into the text, you have to ‘move’ the image up which puts it at the top of the paragraph. There is simply no dynamic positioning.

Update: After viewing this post both on a tablet and a smartphone I have found that the Word formatting only applies if the post is viewed on a computer/laptop. So maybe not such a good option after all.