this blog of mine

Playing with blocks (in WordPress, possibly with real blocks, too)

WordPress 5.0 has launched and it’s introduced a somewhat controversial change to its editor, moving all discrete elements into blocks that can be moved around all willy-nilly, or perhaps even in an orderly manner. (I’ve chosen the new Drop Cap feature for this opening paragraph, to see how it looks. It seem to only appear in the editor when I am not editing this paragraph…er, block.)

The three main advantages of this over the old method:

  • Provides a more WYSIWYG look. For example, this post is showing the same fonts while I’m in the editor as I’ve selected to display on the site, making it easier to know how things will look.
  • Blocks are easier to move around. Content in the old editor is basically just code dumped into a big file and moving it around has always been a bit messy–not unlike mucking around with Word’s formatting, really–and I’ve often ended up in the text mode view to try to straighten out how things look. Blocks should largely eliminate this.
  • It’s the future! Shiny! New!

So far, I have to say it seems fine for my usual posts, which are just lots of words that go on and on. Doing these posts is only very slightly different than before, and certainly no more difficult, so for now I say ten thumbs up! I reserve the right to remove thumbs as I see fit.

And on the second point mentioned in the title, I’ve always wanted to have LEGO to play with, but really have no space for it. I totally missed out when I was a kid. I’ve still got Minecraft, which kind of scratches the same itch, but with the bonus of not taking up half the living room. Or is that actually not a bonus? Hmm.

Update: The Drop Cap looks totally goofy.

50 posts and bonus Photo of the Day, September 30, 2018

This is the first time I’ve hit 50+ posts in a single month. Sure, a bunch of the posts were photos, which feels a bit like cheating, but I still had to go outside to take the photos and all that junk, so there!

Speaking of, here’s a photo. When I went for my run yesterday at Burnaby Lake, I found they had done a clear-cut of the trees near the dam. I assume they were dying, damaged or dead. Or maybe they just hate trees. Anyway, these three are now giant stumps. There are several other ex-trees not far from these ones as well.

My postiest month ever

This is post #43 for January 2018. As of post #39 it became the month with the most posts since I started this blog back on February 4, 2005.

Twenty-one of the posts have been chronicling my efforts to remain complaint-free for…21 days (I complained one day and had to start over). Still, that means 22 posts have theoretically had other content in them, so I feel I’m doing reasonably well. There aren’t any real standouts this month, but neither is there anything that you’d read that would cause you to turn and run away screaming.

But because these sorts of self-indulgent posts are only interesting to me and no one at all visited the site just two days ago (sob), I’ll end with a haiku of minimal entertainment value that I shall call The Blog.

The Blog

So I made a blog
Everyone tweets somewhere else
Write into the wind

One billion websites and on January 26, 2018…

No one visited this site.

When you look at it that way, though, it seems perfectly reasonable. I don’t visit a billion websites. I hardly look at more than ten. I’m an internet underachiever and even the internet overachievers aren’t going to visit a billion sites. Or a million. Or a thousand.

They’re just going to amazon to buy stuff then going to Facebook to post about the stuff they just bought on amazon.

Or watching cat videos on YouTube.

(I was curious how many sites are out there and learned here that about 75% of all sites are just parked domains or something similar, so the number of actual, active sites is much lower…but still inconceivably high for the average person to consider visiting. If you visited one active website every second, it would take you 2,030 days or 5.5 years to get through all of them. Also your mouse would have exploded from all the clicking.)

Still, I am always a little sad when my site gets no traffic for an entire day. Perhaps a small incentive could help drive traffic. It worked for that singing frog.

Black and white and gray: The weather–and now my blog!

Yes, I’ve completely remade the look of the site. The couple of bots scraping it probably won’t even notice. 🙁

Changes made:

  • Super Spud logo removed
  • colored text removed from site logo, post headers and sidebar headers and blog titles on home page
  • navigation at the top of the site is now sticky and full-width
  • footer now full-width to create a kind of visual bookend with the header
  • post background now off-white
  • site background now medium gray for contrast
  • spacing between posts removed (I actually want to have something to split them a little but haven’t figured how to do that yet EDIT: I found the relevant css and now have a thin line to visually separate posts)
  • tightened the spacing above social media links in posts and between sidebar widgets
  • possibly something else I’ve forgotten about
  • added 3% more love

I may chuck it all in a week but for now I kind of like the more subdued, cleaner aesthetic. It will work great with the slightly grainy animated cat gifs I love posting.

Who needs emojis? I do!

I admit it, I like emojis. But I use them in that hipster, post-ironic “I’m too cool for you” way, sort of the same way I use “lol.”

This probably makes me a horrible, petty person in some way, but it’s balanced out by how adorable I find kittens.

I installed the Super Emoji+ plugin for the blog. How is it? Let me sum it up:

If you look carefully, you can see the crying emoji above appears to be an actual severed head as the tears are pooling directly under it. No wonder it’s so sad. Poor body-less little guy.

EDIT: The plugin doesn’t seem to work with the current version of WordPress. Just pretend that giant question mark above is crying.

EDIT, The Sequel: I’ve removed giant question mark and added an image that captures the essence of the missing emoji. My work here is done.

July 6th and 15th, 2017: Into the void! Bonus: amusing cat image

Somehow I managed once again to have not a single person, dog, cat, robot or other living or non-living thing visit this site on July 6th and 15th of this month.

I am more impressed that no one even accidentally came across the site by searching for some errant term that might show up and lead them here.

Still, in a tiny way it’s depressing. I could post nothing on Facebook and get way more hits. I could post nothing on Twitter and probably get sexually harassed.

To celebrate the lack of visitors on either day I now present an amusing cat image.

cat scratch fever

Summer is coming, the perfect time for reruns

I’ve finally started working on expanding the Posts I Like section of the blog, which you can see over yonder in the column to the right. A new link is at the top of the section, Selected lists, complaints and observations. This will direct you to a page that distills the 1,800 or so posts on this blog down to the dozen really worth reading.

I didn’t feel like combing through all 1,774 posts tonight so this will be an ongoing process. I may also add or remove posts in moments of whimsy or as I otherwise see fit.

Enjoy!

A potato in the logo

I’ve adjusted the logo of the site to include Super Spud, my comic creation from a hundred or so years ago. I made did the illustration and coloring while the shading was done by an online friend, jackrabbit.

I don’t quite like the way Super Spud is aligned (he’s a little too close to the edge, though not in the Donald Trump way–zing!) so consider this a work in progress that will be tweaked in the days ahead.

Still, it’s something and it’s not my ugly mug, so there’s that.