Another advantage of the recent WordPress upgrade means I can now do things like this. The photo is a Prague street scene that I found in a newspaper years ago which I decided to depopulate in Photoshop. In the past you could only do this with a special plugin but WordPress changed the user interface a while back from a basic write-text-and-add-media arrangement to a more complex editing system known as Gutenberg. The new editor uses CSS-style blocks which you fill with different types of “content” then shuffle around until you have a layout that you’re happy with. You can do a lot with these blocks but most of the tools that control them are hidden from view behind multiple menus and sub-menus; using the system means you first have to learn and memorise the location and function of all these hidden tools. Users of standalone installations of WordPress are a loyal bunch but there was a very negative reaction to the new editor, so much so that a plugin appeared almost immediately which reverts the interface to the former system. WordPress continues to evolve Gutenberg, however, and now provides a variety of media blocks like this picture-comparison thing. The utility is limited but it looks nice.
I’m in the anti-Gutenberg camp for the most part, especially when looking at the code that makes something like this possible. Most of the posts here are written outside WP as plain text with handwritten HTML tags; Gutenberg adds loads of new tags and instructions that clutter up the back end. I may work as a book designer but a print-style layout isn’t what I want to emulate for these pages. (And the Adobe applications I use don’t hide all their controls unless you really want them to.) Gutenberg is no doubt useful for people with big media websites using WordPress as a CMS to create layouts filled with articles, video and the like. But I’ll be sticking with the old system for now.
I haven’t got the slightest idea what you are talking about! I’m so thankful that I’m a mongoloid!
Yeah, that one was a bit technical wasn’t it? I mainly wanted to say “Hey look…movable picture thing!” but felt it required some explanation.
I want to avoid web technicalities most of the time but I also enjoy having an independent operation that isn’t subject to the whims of capricious billionaires. Doing so means delving into the background mechanics now and then.
Thank you for putting a Dismember Plan song in my head!
https://youtu.be/C4W49WMFfeo
I do not like the Gutenberg thing on WP either, and soon as I discovered I had the classic editor plugin built into mine I switched to using that (and have reformatted the posts I did make with Gutenberg so everything looks the same). I did like that the block thing permitted a certain degree of automation with formatting, but that was all. Now I just do that sort of thing with CSS instead (at least, the minimal amount of it I can work out).
I appreciate their reasons for developing it but don’t like the way it was forced on users in such a heavy-handed manner. Function creep is a real problem for technology in a capitalist world; everyone is impelled to keep growing their product even when there isn’t much call for additional bells and whistles. Adobe have been bad with this in recent years, as have Apple who bloated out the original iTunes from a small music application into a shop/music/video platform that even had a social media offshoot at one point.
Caprices acknowledged, but there was a problem with automated posts on twitter coming from other sites, which may have been a factor (one I remember seeing were multi-daily posts that seemed to originate from the third-party ‘shop’ – prints and so in – linked to a website of an artist who was deceased for a few years at the time which was set up to multi-post across his platforms).
I don’t know how big a problem this kind of thing was, though, & there should have been some way to filter these out of course.
Yeah, I don’t know what the problem is with Twitter.
This post showed a preview there when I manually posted it but the one after it didn’t. All I know for certain
is that autoposting is no longer possible because Twitter was demanding too much money for access to the API so WordPress had to discontinue the service.