Technology Archives - Page 6 of 15

Sweary Thoughts on using WordPress’ new Full Site Editor for the first time

By an old crusty web developer

I must admit, I did wince at the thought of the idea of the Full Site Editor. I have my comfort blankets when it comes to WordPress and when things change I get a bit tetchy at times. Furthermore, I’m not one to give my clients total control. It seems a good thing to not overwhelm clients. Instead allowing them to be focussed on what they’re good at seems like a good thing.

With that said, I’ve been trying to embrace change a fair bit. Some elements will be needed to integrate within my themes. I’ve certainly been spending the last year building sites in the block editor. Overall the sites have been stable, but there’s always room for improvement.

So with the new site editor becoming a thing, I thought I’d take an afternoon out to spin up a website for a potential affiliate product. I have had a domain name – buyafuckingaircon.com – for a while. It was bought during the depressing 2022 heatwave in the UK and Europe, when I was ridiculously hot sitting in a (shaded) area of a beer garden in Berlin. My house has weird insulation – it’s freezing in the winter when I write this and boiling in the summer. I remember a site that I loved the concept – buyafuckingshovel.com (web archive here) – that emailed you once a year in the summer to reminder to buy a shovel. That side project has lived rent free in my head since I first saw it.

Sure enough, the summer, more expensive, edition of it was purchased.

And sat on.

With a quiet afternoon where I had a project that was beginning to drag, I decided to use my time more productively to try and build out the site in about an hour or two. Whenever I work on a new side project, to do something I’ve never done before to learn . I learn a lot by doing so even if the side project is a bust I’ll leave with knowledge.

So the goal was build a side project site, wholly in the in the new full site editor, in under 2 hours.

I documented my thoughts on a Twitter thread (which served as a bit of a precursor to this blog post, but here are my thoughts.

Getting started with the new site editor

Beginning you have to have a theme that has to use it. So I’ve been using Twenty Twenty-Three. I was using a WordPress installation that was installed via my host (Siteground), and I deleted the default page and post. First view of the site editor was this.

I feel like the deletion of the default post and page was a bit of a mistake with the menu breaking and there being no information on the home page could confuse people. I also was confused with the “Mindblown” tagline and the talk of book recommendations. As this wasn’t any way related to the site. It feels like it’s both the placeholder content that WordPress has (“Hello World” with an encouragement to delete the post), or irrelevant content. Irrelevant content is fine or content that encourages users is fine, but I find mix and match a bit confusing.

I backed out and created a page with N7 Ipsum on it, and set it as the home page and there was a lot of change. A thumbnail space was added and everything appeared a lot different.

The interesting thing was that – even though it’s the front page – we don’t use the “front page”, but the page layout. It’s valid (if you look at the WordPress template hierarchy you can use page templates on the home page), but confused me a bit. I’m not sure if it was the Twenty Twenty Three lacked it or it was an issue with the full site editor as I expected a front page template.

Far, starting up does seem a bit confusing, but it perked up when I clicked on “Templates” as I could see the templates available and how to edit it. That’s incredibly welcome and probable more useful for developers to use if they use the Full Site Editor on a more regular basis.

The delight was in the template parts. As well as the header and footer, you can edit the comment template, which is great as it’s an absolute nightmare to edit.

But, I got there. A bit slower than I would have liked, now to build an actual site. Or something useful.

Ongoing Building

The first job was to clean up the home page layout. We won’t need a title tag, nor a featured image, we’d need to remove them.

Sure enough, selecting them, and hitting “delete” removes them. Nice and simple.

Obviously now we’ll need to change the header. We don’t need the menu as we stated above it’s a one page website. The goal then is to make the title text central, a h1, and make the menu stand out.

A massive positive at this point was switching between templates. I’m changing from the page template to the sitewide header template. It’s intuitive (you click, it loads) and it’s quick. Seriously. I have WP Bakery & Elementor running on instances on my Siteground server, and this is quicker than all of them.

The first issue was changing colours. The default palette didn’t have many colours and I wanted to change the theme colours. Alas I couldn’t, as there were “styles”. So I picked one that I didn’t particularly find offensive (the red one). There are custom colours by default in WordPress. I don’t know if this was switched off in Twenty TwentyThree or this is how things are now with the full site editor.

The next couple of issues were traps that I fell in and my clients fall in all the time and it’s something I’m not sure how to fix – selecting the element. As the site title is an element that exists as the header. I was able to edit it but not sure how to change it to a H1. It took me a while to realise that the paragraph symbol needs to be clicked and then changed to a H1.

I then wanted to centrally align the logo, and couldn’t. Eventually by clicking on the row and going up the element tree I was able to change the item justification.

We then changed the footer. Changing the footer was largely fine, though removing the WordPress link and replace with my freelance link to Dwi’n Rhys was a bit of a faff.

In the end, we had with something like this.

My next goals was change the header a bit. Get the header flush to the top of the screen, and remove the white gaps at the top and bottom of the page(s).

And this is where I tapped out, and had to use CSS. The issues were that the white line you see was a border. I couldn’t work out how to remove it. Furthermore there was an issue with how the form (Mailpoet) was displaying on mobile. Simple fixes really, but outside of the FSE. There was a problem with using CSS, and I share that in the goals.

Goals

Let’s look if I achieved my goals.

Did I build a new site? Yes 🎉🎉🎉
Did I build it wholly in the new site editor? No. There was a small amount of custom CSS. In the end the solution was found in a thread, that – err – required me to log into the customizer within WordPress which was hidden. Not ideal
Did I build it in under 2 hours? Not quite. Let’s call it 4. But 2 is reasonable with a bit of knowledge behind me.

Thanks

I did want to shout out a resource. Full Site Editing with WordPress is a site I landed on that talked through some of the issues I had again and again. A big thanks to Carolina Nymark for putting the resource together.

Conclusion

Am I going to be building themes in it professionally? Probably not. When you approach me for WordPress development my rates and experience will mean that I operate at the price point that you get coded themes, rather than thrown together code. With that said, I can possibly use it professionally for those clients that just need a simple solution built quickly. Those quick sites for a retainer that I get asked? Perfect for this.

But for quick side projects? Getting a site up and out and ranking? Sure. For your own personal blog? Sure. Especially with Twitter being a dumpster fire, owning your own content will become more and more popular again, or so I hope.

Oh, and buy a fucking air-con. Your summer self will thank you.

Old Man Yells at Cloud (Based Systems)

Or: How I miss the old internet.

So I’ve been thinking recently quite a lot about where I stand on the fact that noted person who had money and did okay with it but he’s a wee bit of a numpty Elon Musk has bought my favourite social media site. There are far more interesting takes about what the hell he will do with it (I urge you to read The Verge article on it).

I worry about what he will do to the place. I worry about it’s role as a player in a future Arab-Spring like event. I worry about my friends who – somehow – made it a safe space going forward. I worry that it’ll become a haven of extreme right wing rhetoric it’s been pretty good at stopping. I’m also worrying that he will kill the site, as so far his rhetoric on making back $44bn has been small fries. I do feel with a lot of these systems the only way they make money is by trying everything else (anybody else remember when WordPress.org started selling links?), and $8p/m verification doesn’t seem like it ever will recover the investment. Like a shiny toy, I worry he’ll get bored and abandon it. That’s how it happens in tech, right?

If the latter will come to pass, it’ll be a shame, as it has been one of the more positive social media sites I’ve been on. It was instrumental in phase 2 of my career (back when MancSEO was in it’s infancy, I travelled to their meetup on a random Thursday night in January 2010, and met the wonderful SEO Community that I’m still friends with), but that was when Twitter was a lot smaller, and it was easy to find people to connect with and chat to. The Tweets were shorter, but the conversations were longer.

I miss that.

But then, I miss the old internet. I don’t want to gatekeep people from access to a tool that has started revolutions, but I do feel like the internet was maybe slightly better where we didn’t congregate around singular water coolers, as turns out a large group of people in one place invariably generates some bad apples, and maybe we need to go back into our respective silos.

Sure, we may not get the reach. I doubt this blog post would get the eyeballs on it that if I posted it in a thread on Twitter I would have got, but is that a bad thing? Surely you would want to share your content to the largest eyeballs as quickly as possible, but if we get one or two people who are genuinely interested, rather than those with a passing glance, surely that’s better? A warm lead, as opposed to an ice cold one, to use marketing speak.

Plus, if we have smaller silos, we will probably see more innovation. Social media is a behemoth, and really if the only innovation they can come up with is an easily abusable verification system or a system that has legs with graphics the average third year game development student can knock together (seriously, I wrote a QBasic game in the early 2000s, that had legs), then it probably doesn’t deserve the eyeballs it needs.

Retro Gamer forum meetup at r3Play Blackpool from 2011. Ironically it came up in my Facebook memories today.

But that’s the thing, they need the eyeballs, they need the communities. I miss forums. Forums were a thing, but they went away when we all transferred over to social media. Maybe they should come back, as they were great for conversations surround great topics. I remember sitting for days on the Retro Gamer forums (a forum that only shut recently) discussing retro games. A couple of the members of said forum I class as close friends. Heck even on forums where I didn’t dedicate all my time I have had positive experiences – even now on Facebook I have a couple of people who I befriended on a Blitz Basic coding forum on my friends list. Maybe I want people to have similar positive experiences, that have enriched my life like the years I’ve spent online.

The best conversations with the best people I’ve had recently have occurred on Discord, and it’s the only system since early Twitter that I’ve been happy to meet people off of it. I’m not sure if Mastodon and a decentralised system is really the solution (purely because joining is a bit of a nightmare), but maybe they’re on to something with a decentralised system.

Maybe as well as having a decentralised system, we need to decentralise the users as well.

PROGRESS Wrestling Events Calendar for Google Calendar (and others)

So I was…volunteered…recently to create a PROGRESS Wrestling Event Calendar to showcase all the events on Google Calendar (similar to how football teams have done). The hope is that once a year it’s updated with the show dates once known, that way if you’re planning holidays or less important things such as weddings you don’t book on the date of a PROGRESS show. It isn’t perfect (I’m sure I switch between 2 or 3 different times, and I haven’t included the shows for the end of 2017 I don’t think), but it should give you a rough idea of when PROGRESS have shows.

How to Install

Click here to download the ics file

Here’s how I’ve installed it in the systems I’ve used and tested with. Of course, I’m testing with systems I own.

Google Calendar

Click to download the file, and then go to Google Calendar, click “Settings” and then the “Calendars” tab. Create an empty calendar (call it PROGRESS Wrestling or something). Click Import Calendar. Browse to the file downloaded, upload it into the empty calendar created, and it should sync.

Android Phones

Download it and it should sync with your chosen Calendar App.

Apple Mac

Click to download the ics file. The file is downloaded, click to open it and it opens in Calendar for Apple Mac.

Questions?

I’m going to try and keep it up to date, but this is more of a labour of love rather than anything more than that, so please be patient (I run a business and have a day job too). But any questions (as well as any corrections) feel free to drop me an email and I’ll try and get back to you. Though to be honest I’m utterly crap at answering emails at the best of times. But yeah, this is a fan project, be sure to check out PROGRESS’ stuff as it’s mint.

Also if you want to buy me a drink (a few people have suggested it). Yeah, sure! Cheers! Mine’s usually a Tuborg. I don’t go to Camden Shows but usually in the shows up north.

Paris Twat-German

I’d like to think I keep my personal political opinions to myself, but I really don’t like Donald Trump.

I really don’t want to make it a political post, but I was told at a young age “be nice, or be honest. Try to be both, but be one”. I don’t think Donald Trump is either. Furthermore, he is not exactly a successful business man – he’d be worth $10 Billion more if he took his money and simply invested in Index Funds in the stock market – so I cannot find really any redeemable qualities to the man. He also cannot take a Stone Cold Stunner:-

But this blog post isn’t about him.

It’s about me. You see, as I mentioned in my launch blog post, I’m following the advice in Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word and learning JavaScript deeply. JavaScript is the language of Google Chrome Extensions.

In short, I have written a short Chrome Extension that finds any mention of “Donald Trump” and changes it to “Paris Twat-German”, a monniker I think I heard first on Scott’s twitter account. It’s daft. It’s purile. It was written drunkenly. It’s probably not what Matt had in mind when he gave his State of the Word. But I don’t care, I’m learning and it piqued my interest for an evening.

Anyway, I’ve hosted the extension on Github. You can download it here directly. Installation instructions are there, along with ideas on how to extend it. Let me know what you think!

WordCamp Europe 2014 Unofficial Walking Tour – Tickets Now Available

With WordCamp Europe 2014 just under 2 weeks away I’m delighted to announce that the tickets for the walking tour are now available for general release!

The tour is a private tour full of all the major sights and buildings in Sofia, Bulgaria, you will be guided on a 2 hour tour of the city, with interesting facts & the history of the city all discussed. I sat writing this on holiday in Barcelona, and yesterday did a similar tour, they are very good and was introduced to various things I would’ve missed otherwise. This is also a private tour for attendees to WordCamp, so you will be with individuals you can talk to and network with about WordPress, should you wish.

It takes place the day before WordCamp – on the 26th September at 9:30am. There is a small charge of €5.88 to cover the cost of the tour.

Anyway, hope to see you there!

Any questions, please let me know!