Category: WordPress

I’m still slacking off on my hope to do a better job with keeping a presence online. I need massive simplicity, and as much as I dig WordPress, I don’t find the workflow intuitive. So, on my quest to find the simplest, easiest editor that will let me publish posts quickly, with relatively rich content, I continue to stumble around. Nothing out there does exactly what I want. And frankly, this is just not anywhere near representing a high priority. Blogo was easy to use, but they died. I’m not sure where they went? IFTTT supports an automatic hook to allow a new Evernote post to post to WP, but not a self-hosted WP blog like this. I am close to just giving up and editing directly on the WP interface. Given the great functionality that Project Gutenberg has given to WP users with Blocks, that’s not really a bad option. My bit of frustration comes just with dealing with media files, mostly images.

So, checking out MarsEdit, available on the App Store. Do not let the free price to download and install fool you. It’s free with complete features for 14-days, then your ability to publish content is disabled. To continue, you must pay $49 for a full license.

Here’s the interface running on my Mac in Dark Mode. You can see it fully supports Dark Mode in Catalina:

There are also options to edit your slug, tags, select the WP categories this post is assigned to, select your featured image, and other server options to set your post status, author, whether comments are closed, etc. Overall, it seems quite simple. But, I mostly care about editing. You can see above it’s a basic functional rich-text editor. It supports the most common formatting commands.

Yet, we know that WP has made a substantial commitment to its Project Gutenberg – their new Blocks editor. So, what happens when you publish a brand new post? It comes up in “classic” mode when you open your post in WP:

I can attempt to convert my post to Blocks…

but sometimes it results in no change, and leaves your post in classic mode. Other times, it does indeed work. I’m not certain what the triggers are that prevent your post from converting to separate blocks, though this is not a big deal to me.

At first glance, this tool seems a bit pricey. However, the workflow I need to quickly publish updates from my Mac with minimal effort is definitely there. I might adopt this. Why? There are two tools I rely on extensively when writing documentation – quick screen captures, and recording quick little GIF animations. Having to save a file, upload it to my Media, and then reference it, is an absolute pain.

I’ll try this for a bit…

So, you’re interested in contributing some code back to the wonderful Internet community. Well, your first stop should surely be Github. If you’ve been a student in Computer Science, or pretty much any discipline where you need some code or libraries to accomplish some task, then surely you know that 1) Github is your primary go-to, and 2) you better have set up an account, and started sharing some examples of code for your future employers and collaborators to see what you do.

For some of us, however, we want access to a platform that can give us a bit more flexibility to be able to be a bit more reflective and educational with the code we share, and not simply just share code. And, of course there are dozens of options out there for doing that as well. For me, I spent years just managing my own site using Adobe Dreamweaver. However, it was becoming a bit overkill for what I was trying to achieve. I’ve used WordPress for various classes I teach, but not for my own endeavors. Well, as of 2019, that has changed. I narrowed down my search between Medium and WordPress, and concluded that both would have worked. However, I ultimately decided on WordPress due to convincing myself that it had a bit more flexibility to do some cool things.

Plugins

At some point, I’ll start a log of plugins I use…

There is one plugin that is one of my favs…

WP Pusher

One plugin I’ll mention right off the bat is WP Pusher. While WordPress manages a pretty rich set of plugins, some developers have complained that it takes a bit of time to get their plugins available through their API. Also, you’ll quickly notice that there are a lot of outdated plugins still available that may not necessarily work properly on your version of WordPress. Instead, you can deploy plugins directly from GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab.

It’s quite simple to install WP Pusher:

1. Go to WP Pusher
2. Download the zip file (wppusher.zip).
3. Go to your WordPress dashboard, and select Plugins -> Add Plugins -> Upload Plugin. Upload your zip file.
4. Activate it!

You should now notice that you have a new menu item available called WP Pusher.

That’s it! Find a WordPress plugin on GitHub, and readily install it using WP Pusher! All plugins you install and activate from WP Pusher will then be available and managed from your standard Plugin interface. Very cool.

I’m testing out some plugins to do some syntax highlighting. This first one is EnlighterJS Syntax Highlighter

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

This next one will use Prismatic:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
for i in range(10):
    print(i)