Category: Web

I made a major discovery this morning in that I came across someone who’s work you could say aligns with my own laterally but who is using much simpler language to communicate a lot of the complexities of life that I’ve been using abstract metaphoric means to do so. So I’ve learnt a lot from this person already in just one day and thus I’ve decided to reactivate my website and continue with my work but I will be striving to do so using a language that will hopefully be much more simpler and accessible to the average person, if I can. I’ll provide more details on this later.

I’ll be taking this site down indefinitely but will be keeping a local instance running on my personal computer. Basically I see no point in sharing any of my work anymore, until I can reach a point where I can actually structure it, as I work through it, so that the structure can help someone else make sense of it by navigating through it.

I’m not exactly sure how to do this yet though, be it with WordPress or potentially maybe even with Obsidian Publish in the future, but for now this seems pointless, as I just seem to be going in circles.

To clarify what I mean, the issue isn’t communicating insights into what I’m seeing in the moment. That’s easy. In effect, I can write posts all day that talk about this aspect or that aspect of my work. The issue is connecting all of these different aspects of my work up together into a bigger picture.

For example, I can intuitively see how vertical development is effectively connected to everything in life, be it gaming, politics, the world of work, whatever. That’s because how we perceive the world with our perception (thus not seeing reality directly) is the cornerstone of most of our problems in our world today. And until I can figure out a way to lead people through their inner psychological world, making them understand how their perception works and how it often creates problems for them, thus allowing them to see how everything connects up themselves, I won’t make much headway with my work.

As I’ve always said, I want to structurally build something that I feel like I can actually stand upon but as yet, I’m unsure how best to do this. So until I figure it out, I’m done.

Laters!

Doh! I just realized that while I did a static backup of my last WordPress site before I had to cancel it (due to costs), I forgot to do an actual WordPress XML backup.

So while I’ve imported my old posts again, I still have somewhere near 250 posts that I have to manually add in again, if I want to get my site back to the way it was. And considering these are probably some of my most deepest posts, where I’m really digging deep to try to express myself and my work, I really need to add them back in again.

The upside is that my new hosting plan is only costing me around $10/month (versus the $30/month previously), so costs shouldn’t be an issue anymore (well, as long as they don’t keep rising as well). So all said and done, I’m hoping this will be the last time I need to shut my site down again, especially since I’ve tried a lot of alternative sites (like Medium) and prefer to just stick with WordPress going forward from now on.

Update

Just manually add in 10 posts and it didn’t go too bad, as I can copy and paste the entire post body into WordPress and it seems fine. The slow down is when there is images on the post which I have to manually upload and insert. Still shouldn’t be that bad considering I don’t have a ton of posts with images. So hopefully if I do manually import 10-20 posts a day, I can get it done within a couple of weeks at most.

Doh! But I just noticed something else that I’ve never seen before! WordPress imported my old posts from the XML backup and created the categories for the posts but didn’t actually apply the categories to the posts themselves. So all of my old posts are marked as just “General” category. Oh well, guess I needed to clean up my categories anyways.

I may before the end of the year switch to another website option, as I’m finding my Dreamhost VPS hosting plan is costing me way too much at the moment (even though it’s an amazing service & support), primarily because the US to Canadian exchange rate bumps it up from $20/month US to $30/month CDN. If I was actually making money from my work at the moment, it wouldn’t be a big deal but I’m not as yet.

I’m looking at both Substack and Medium as other potential options, although I’m not hot on either, due to their limited formatting capabilities (i.e. they can’t even do a proper quote and citation, which seems nuts for long form publishing services). My basic requirement is that I can utilize my domain names and it be fairly affordable. Since Substack has a $50 one time feed for domains, I’ll more than likely use Medium (which is only $5/month US and you can apply multiple domains to multiple publications for just that one fee).

If I didn’t care about using my domains though, then Substack would probably be the easier solution, as it’s base service is completely free.

Over the last day or so, I heavily modified my current Twenty Twenty WordPress theme to see if I could emulate Featured Block functionality that I’d like to see added to WordPress in a future update (probably as a “Make Featured Block” checkbox in compatible blocks).

This arose out of my thoughts the other day where I believed WordPress needed to go beyond Featured Images and shift to Featured Blocks, especially if it wants to be able to emulate old Post Format features that are comparable to features on other platforms.

Basically the first part of emulating this was easy by defining a specific block as Featured Block by just adding a class within the Advanced area of the block and calling it “featured”.

It got trickier though because you need to allow the Featured Block to be displayed on the blog list view but without the rest of the post content. Thus to achieve this, every post that you create has to have a “More” Block within it that the Featured Block has to be above, thus allowing it to be shown on the blog list view, with the rest of the post content below it, so it remains hidden in the blog list view.

After achieving these two things, the hardest part of all is then getting the Featured Block to be shown and stylized in the right way utilizing a Grid Card style (which I was easily able to activate using the Twentig plugin for the Twenty TwentyWordPress theme). Trying to get the Featured Block to move to the top of each card post was way too difficult to do using CSS alone, so I decided to use jQuery to move it there.

And last but not least, a butt load of CSS was finally done to stylize each specific Featured Block type I decided to use (i.e. Pullquote, Cover, etc).

All said and done, I’m pretty amazed I achieved this in such a short amount of time. Going forward, I’ll see if I can stylize and optimize it further.

Best of all though, this new theme layout finally allows me to feel comfortable writing in both short form and long form because the blog list view of the theme emulates Twitter’s card format. So if I want to write a short thought of a sentence or two, it looks great on the blog list view. Although I need some small simple visual indicator icon on the card that indicates if there is more to read, so that the reader knows if there is more content inside the card or not.

While skimming through the latest WordPress 6.1 Product Walk-Through Recap, I noticed some really amazing features finally being added to WordPress.

I actually remember manually coding some of these features myself on Movable Type many, many years ago when that web platform used to be all the rage. Specifically the ability to customize the template for a specific category (8:55) or even a specific post (8:35) is pretty amazing.

I was also highly interested in hearing what Nicholas Diego (37:00) had to say as the Editor Triage Lead for WordPress 6.1. The reason for this is that I find the usability experience for Editor user interface to be severely lacking still, with the key issue being they are overloading the non-techie end user (but even the techie designers & developers as well) with too much functionality at once in the same place. Instead they should be creating different focused context modes that the end user can switch to (similar to Squarespace Version 5 over a decade ago), so they don’t get confused and overwhelmed.

At the very least, if they don’t do this, they should make specific areas of the interface context specific, similar to how they are almost doing it now. For example, the Structure mode area is primarily on the left side of the interface, showing the nested layout of the blocks, whereas the Style mode area is on the right hand side of the interface.

But they need to go beyond this and make the interface function much more consistently within the different modes. For example, right now when you’re using the left hand Structure area and you press a block on the page, the corresponding block within the left nested layout of blocks gets highlighted as well which is nice.

The same thing should happen with the right hand Style area as well though (when it’s open) in that when you press on a block on the page, the corresponding style editing settings for that block should automatically be shown, so you can adjust it immediately. Again because there are no focused contextual modes but rather just these panels, it can become overwhelming for the end user to figure out where to look, especially when playing with the Editor for the first time.

But as it stands right now, the specific block style areas are buried under a couple of submenus which is just crazy. Instead all block styles options should be shown by default when you open the Style panel, yet the default Body and Heading settings for the entire site should be listed at the top of the entire Style list. Then below that, each specific block type should be linked by default to either the Body or Heading style setting but with the option to specifically customize it further if the end user so wishes. This would make the Style area far more user friendly for the new user, creating a cascading style logic that they can understand.

All said and done, I’m still excited and interested in trying out WordPress 6.1 when it’s released. Oh and for those who want to see more of Nicholas Diego’s work on the Editor (aka Full Site Editing), he has a bunch of videos on WordPress.TV you can check out as well.

I’ve been playing around with my site design a bit, exploring different Google Font combinations and I think I’ve found one that I really like in terms of overall front-end style and readability but also with regards to backend writing.

I’m decided upon Lora for the body and Lato for the headings.

To apply this to my WordPress Twenty Twenty theme, I’ve added the amazing Twentig plug-in and then when customizing my site, I’ve chosen Twentig Options > Fonts then under Body I’ve set it to “Lora / Medium / Medium” (i.e. font / size / line height) and under Headings I’ve set it to “Lato / Black 900 / Tight / Larger.” I also had to set the Site Title Font Weight to “Black 900” under Site Title as well.

All said and done, I’m absolutely loving the look and feel of my single page layouts in WordPress now.

Next thing to tackle though is how my listing of posts are shown. Currently under Twentig Options > Blog, I’ve set the Blog Layout to “Stack” (which causes the post title and meta details to be tucked in tighter compared to the single page layout format).

While I may set the Blog Layout back to “Default,” I still want some way of visually differentiating long form posts from short form (micro) posts somehow, potentially even rearranging long form posts first and short form posts afterwards on listing pages (using either CSS or JQuery if need be).

Finally, while I’d also love to dive into full site editing with the Twenty Twenty Twotheme, the user interface design and usability of it is just no where near it needs to be. It’s highly convoluted and confusing, especially compared to Squarespace’s interface. In fact, I actually find the old Version 5 of Squarespace to be much more powerful and easier to use, since you activated different focused modes (i.e. Content, Structure, Style, Preview) to work on your site.

So in Style mode in Squarespace Version 5, you could only stylize elements but the interface was way more powerful, yet simpler to use than the style interface in WordPress. That’s the primary problem with the WordPress full site editing interface today, figuring out the context of what you’re working on is extremely confusing and frustrating. However, once they do figure this out, WordPress will finally surpass Squarespace in both power and usability which is amazing considering where WordPress was a decade ago.

At the same time, it would be nice for WordPress to have a similar layout structure as Twitter. In effect, I like the primary feeling of my list view to be one of a collection of notes with the occasional longer form interjected within it.

Or perhaps the default list view just shows long form articles, with the option to switch to a notes list view. This lets the reader just see the essence of your work upfront but then also have the option to see how that work evolved bit by bit.

When I’m writing on WordPress, it feels like there’s this expectation to expand things to make it long form. On Twitter, since it’s short form, there’s no expectation. You just write.

It would be nice to replicate that feeling of Twitter into WordPress somehow.