block editor

Blogging Insights — Piece of Cake

Fandango11 Comments

For her weekly Blogging Insights prompts, Dr. Tanya provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote seems to me to be another fortune cookie-like quote:

I don’t agree with this quote that nothing worth doing is ever easy. I object to the words “nothing” and “ever.” I think there are some things worth doing that are easy. Or at least, aren’t that hard.

Maybe I’ve led a charmed life, but most of the things that I considered worth doing came fairly easily to me. Or maybe that’s because I decided somewhere along the way that if something didn’t come easily to me, it probably wasn’t worth my doing it. Yeah, that just might be the case.

But since this prompt is supposed to be focused on writing and blogging, let me respond in that specific context. I always felt that I was a decent writer and that writing was pretty easy for me. I was also fairly computer savvy back in the day, so when I first started blogging in 2005, I was able to figure my way around the mechanics of blogging platforms (first Blogger, then TypePad, and then WordPress) fairly easily.

Well, until WordPress foisted the block editor on us. I resisted the block editor for a long time because it was different and, in my opinion, difficult. But ultimately I gave in and decided that I either had to embrace the block editor or leave WordPress (or stop blogging altogether). And once I made that decision, I found that it wasn’t so bad and now I can’t imagine going back to the classic editor again. Who knew?

Blogging Insights — Learnings

Fandango5 Comments

For this week’s edition of Blogging Insights, Dr. Tanya wants to know…

What are you learning (or are you still learning) from your blogging experience?

Most recently I’ve learned how to conquer the block editor, which isn’t the disaster that I thought it was, but that I strenuously resisted for almost a year.

I use the WordPress iOS app from my iPhone for my blog, and the version of the block editor on the iPhone is what I call “block-lite” because it doesn’t have all of the features and functionality that the one available on laptops or desktops does. But that’s okay because neither did the iOS app classic editor, which I called “classic-lite,” have all of the bells and whistles of the full-fledged classic editor. But I can get by with the “lite” version of the block editor because I don’t really do any fancy things with my blog.

Another thing that I have learned is that the developers at WordPress focus more on rolling out new “features” and “functionality” that few of us casual (i.e., non-business, non-commercial, non-professional) bloggers need or want. But they don’t spend nearly enough time fixing bugs in the current functionality, bugs that drive many of us crazy.

I’ve also learned since migrating to WordPress from two previous blog hosting sites (Blogger and Typepad), that the community of bloggers here on WordPress is what keeps me going, even with the frustrations that I’ve expressed ad infinitum over the years — in particular, this past year — in my posts. Were it not for you all who read, like, and comment on my posts, I’d have been long gone from blogging.

Playing With Blocks

Fandango4 Comments

I have a question for those of you who are knowledgeable about the version of the block editor that is available on the WordPress iOS app for the iPhone. If you don’t use the block editor on your iPhone, feel free to skip this post. And if you’re using a laptop (be it a Windows PC or a Mac) and know how to do what I’m asking about on a laptop, don’t bother responding. I know how to do it on those devices with full-sized, physical keyboards. I’m trying to figure out how to do it on an iPhone’s tiny virtual keypad.

So what is my question? It has to do with removing blocks within a post. Not removing a single block. I know how to do that. I’m asking about removing multiple blocks simultaneously.

There are situations where I want to copy a previous post and reuse some of the content from that post to write a new post. I find the post that I want to copy and then tap “Duplicate” to create a new draft of the post. Below is an example where I want to create a copy of a previous Flashback Friday post.

Once I get to the draft of the post that was created when I tapped “Duplicate,” I will typically reuse the first several paragraphs, but then I want to delete the remainder of the post that I copied and add new paragraphs. But in the block editor, I have to individually delete each block that I don’t want to use.

When I could still use the classic editor, all I had to do was select the starting point of the text I wanted to delete, highlight it and keep highlighting all the way down the page, and then hit “Cut.” In one fell swoop, all of the text I cut was deleted. Easy peasy.

But it seems that in the block editor, I can only highlight the text within a block, not across multiple blocks. And that means if I want to remove, say, ten blocks from the duplicated post, I need to individually remove each of those ten blocks one block at a time.

So, before I reach out to the happiness engineers, who are, I’m sure, tired of hearing from me, do any of you know if there is a way to remove multiple blocks at one time in the WordPress iOS app’s block editor? Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

It’s Not as Scary as It Appears to Be

Fandango25 Comments

I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m wrong. For the past year I have written a deluge of posts lambasting WordPress’ decision to “decommission” (their word) the reliable, easy to use classic editor and to force us to “embrace” its block (Gutenberg) editor, whether we wanted to or not. And I most certainly did not want to.

As most of you know, I blog from my iPhone. In fact, at this very moment, I am sitting on my couch in my family room, listening to classic rock music, and composing this post.

But I digress. I have vigorously resisted this whole block editor thing for the better part of a year. First, I didn’t see any need for the elimination of the tried and true classic editor. Why, if the developers at WordPress were so thrilled with the new block editor, couldn’t they offer it as a “new and better” option, while continuing to offer the (mostly) beloved classic editor?

Second, the block editor that WordPress first introduced last year was not designed for use on the relatively small screen of mobile device. Maybe it worked well on a laptop, but it was shit on an iPhone. I resented feeling that if I wanted to continue to blog on WordPress, I’d have to do so on a laptop because the block editor was close to impossible to use on an iPhone. I even wrote in response to one of Dr Tanya’s Blogging Insights posts last July, “If the day ever comes when WordPress no longer offers the classic editor, that will be the day I will either find a different platform for my blog or I will just stop blogging.”

Well, that day came for those of us using the iOS app on our iPhones last month, when, as I explained in this post, WordPress removed the classic editor option from its iOS app. And that’s when it was shit or get off the pot time for me.

So I decided that I was going to dedicate myself to figuring out how to blog on my iPhone using the dreaded block editor, as it had become my only option. And it’s now my duty, as a member of this great blogging community, to admit that, in my rants over the past year, I seemed to have been making that proverbial mountain out of a molehill.

The current version of the block editor in the WordPress iOS app is usable. I can pretty much do with it all of what I was able to do with the iOS version of the classic editor. In fact, I can do a few more things with the iOS block editor than I could with the iOS classic editor.

So now I have no excuse to whine and rant about the block editor. No reason to hunt for another blog hosting site to move to. I’ve been able to move forward with the block editor on my iPhone without too much pain.

What I’ve learned is that no matter how dark the corridor ahead appears to be, one shouldn’t be afraid to step into it and see where it leads.

(I hope you appreciate how I managed to fit my FOWC with Fandango daily prompt word, “corridor,” into this post despite the fact that it had no relevance to the rest of this post.)

Written for these daily prompts: Your Daily Word Prompt (deluge), The Daily Spur (duty), Word of the Day Challenge (proverbial), MMA Storytime (mountain), Ragtag Daily Prompt (excuse), and Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (corridor).

Thank You Fellow Bloggers

Fandango18 Comments

On Sunday, in this post, I asked a question to the WordPress blogging community about how to create single-spaced text within the paragraph block in the block editor instead of having to use the verse block. A number of you offered suggestions.

Some suggestions could work on a Windows computer with a full-sized, physical keyboard, but not on the virtual keypad of an iPhone. Others suggested going into the HTML and making changes using the <br> tag, which inserts a single line break. And still others suggested using an external text editor to draft the text that I wanted to single space and then cut and paste it into the paragraph block.

Well, I ended up going with the external text editor, writing my seven-line “poem,” and copying the text into the paragraph block. And here’s what I got:

This is a test
Of some HTML code
Within the paragraph block
To see if it permits
Me to single space
Without using the
Verse block

Woo hoo! That is exactly what I wanted to do. Yay!

So I want to offer a huge thank you to those of you who took the time to respond to my post and to offer help. I am now more determined than ever to master this block editor because I can’t imagine blogging anywhere other than on WordPress because of all of you. You are the most generous, supportive, encouraging, helpful, and most sincere community of bloggers there is. Thank you for being who you are.

And for those of you who are interested in this sort of thing, here is what the HTML view looks like for the six lines of single-spaced, center-justified text.