iPhone

Am I Feeling Vulnerable?

Fandango30 Comments

I usually don’t respond to my own Provocative Question prompts, but this week I’m making an exception. Especially when Melanie, over at Sparks from a Combustible Mind, commented, “This is one question I hope YOU write an answer to, too. It’d be interesting to hear your thoughts on the matter.”

My Provocative Question post yesterday referenced Pegasus, the latest kind of spyware that can spy on almost any device and any social media networks and messaging apps without the victim having any knowledge that it’s happening.

When I first learned about Pegasus, it freaked me out that hackers could access my iPhone, monitor my keystrokes, track my location, and hijack both the microphone and camera. I use my iPhone all the time. It’s always on. It has all of my credit card information on it, my bank account information, my retirement account information, my investments information. I use it to talk and text with my kids. If some evil doer can get at all of my information and see me through my phone’s camera and hear me through the phone’s microphone, I’m in deep doo doo.

I told my wife about it and started to have a panic attack. You know what she did? She started laughing at me and said “get over yourself.” She asked, “Are you an activist, an important business executive, a high powered lawyer, a senior government official, a journalist?”

I said, “No, but I am a blogger who has been quite outspoken about….”

She held up her hand to stop me and said, “I hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but you’re a nobody. I don’t think you need to worry about anyone wasting their time trying to track your every move.”

So now I feel much more at ease about the prospect of being victimized by this spyware.

At the same time, though, I’m pretty bummed that my wife of more than 40 years thinks of me as a nobody.

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).

Scratching My Head

Fandango20 Comments

I am scratching my head, wondering if I’m losing my mind or if WordPress is gaslighting me. As I announced in this post, I decided to embrace the block editor on my iPhone. Well, actually, WordPress decided for me when they removed the classic editor from their iOS app, as I explained in this post.

I’m not a novice blogger, but when it comes to using the block editor on my iPhone, I am definitely a neophyte. But I decided the best way for me to master the block editor is to just do it. And I was doing okay using the block editor without suffering undo agony. But I got to a point where I was unsure how to do something in the block editor, so I thought I’d call up the more familiar classic block. But the classic block was nowhere to be found on the iOS app. So I sent a message to the happiness engineers.

I’ve been trying to use the block editor on my iPhone, but I can’t seem to find the classic block in the latest version (17.1) of the app. It’s not listed as a block when I hit the plus sign and there’s no “search blocks” field that allows me to find it. So can you tell me how to add the classic block, as has been suggested, when it’s not there?

And this is the response I got.

I’m glad to know that you’ve taken the initiative to try out the block editor! I hope the experience was good. Regarding adding the classic block in the app, unfortunately, it isn’t supported in the latest version of the iOS app.

What? For months WordPress has been saying that we could use the classic block in the block editor in the iOS app to help us “bridge the gap” between the classic editor and the block editor, but now they’re saying that the classic block, which I know used to be in the block editor on the iOS app, is no longer there. Seriously?

I think we are being gaslighted.

Share Your World — Human Nature

Fandango9 Comments

Share Your WorldIt’s Monday and that means that Melanie is back with her Share Your World prompt. So let’s do this.

What was the last TV show you binge-watched? If you don’t watch TV (congratulations by the way) what’s the last thing you binged ON?

Actually, at Melanie’s recommendation, I started to watch “The Brokenwood Mysteries” last night on Amazon Prime. I watched the first episode of season one of this seven season crime drama that takes place in the small town of Brokenwood in Australia, where troubled DCI Mike Shepherd solves murders while searching for redemption. Episode one was good enough to prompt me to watch episode two. When I tried to do that, though, I learned that I’d have to pay $4.99 to watch each additional episode. NFW!So, I am going to go with the show that I binge-watched just before I attempted to binge watch this one. That show was “Hinterland,” a noir crime drama set in the small town of Aberystwyth, Wales, where troubled DCI Tom Mathias solves murders while searching for redemption. I enjoyed it.

What’s your most prized possession and why?

My iPhone. Were it not for my iPhone, I wouldn’t be in the process of posting my response to Melanie’s SYW prompt.

If you had the time and inclination, what would you volunteer for?

I have the time, but I lack the inclination. Sorry about that.

Do you think that humans will ever be able to live together in harmony?

It’s not in our nature to live together in harmony. We seem more inclined to seek and act out upon our differences and we seem to thrive on conflict.