The Mandelbear's Musings

Not a bad week. Except for yesterday, when I cleverly left Sable (my main laptop) down in Seattle. I know how it happened, too -- a slight disruption to my usual routine (caused by having someone quarantining in "my" room for a week, so having to make sure I had a week's worth of everything) plus having an extra bag in my hand (the shirts that need buttons sewed on).

Fortunately, this was only a mild inconvenience, because I have backups of almost everything. Except for the most recent version of my password file, which includes all of my WordPress passwords. Fortunately, I have ssh. Connecting to the server directly and using the wp command, it became obvious why I couldn't just reset my password -- I'd put an extra "z" in my email address! Fixable. Everything else I absolutelyneed is in Git. (My financial stuff, including what I need for taxes, isn't. But I don't need it this week.)

<rant>

Have I mentioned that I've been fighting with WordPress? The designers N hired to build GoingSideways.blog are very good designers. The logo they designed is great. But they do not appear to be programmers. WordPress is in the process of switching to a new paradigm -- blocks. There's a block editor -- Gutenberg, which has been around for a while now -- and it is finally possible to find block themes, and to lay out the entire site in Gutenberg instead of just the main content area.

Old themes and old WSYWYG "page builders" are, to a greater or lesser degree, incompatible with the new way of doing things. The WPBakery page buiilder is almost completely incompatible with blocks The WoodMark theme, which is primarily intended for ecomerce sites rather than blogs, is almost as bad. Once I figured out how to switch to Gutenberg for page content, I've been using it exclusively. Among other things it works very well with importing markdown text from Emacs, and doesn't import it from GMail. N uses markdown-style asterisks to indicate italics. And it's also a lot easier to do basic image processing with command-line tools and the Gimp.

At this point I have almost all of the content we inherited from the designers converted to blocks. The only exception is the home page, which is loaded with gimmickry and will probably require considerable cleanup and a little redesign. With luck I can get that done this week or next, and ditch WPBakery. Then I'll be able to switch to a block theme and get rid of WoodMark.

GoingSideways is about adventures for people with chronic health issues. Adventures for programmers and writers -- not so much.

</rant>

( Notes & links, as usual )