Tag Archives: WordPress
Until now, I haven’t posted here all month, and I’m not sure I’ll post anything before the end of the year. My attention definitely is more towards Substack these days, and I increasingly ask myself why to bother with WordPress anymore?
For one, their technology continues to depress me. This week it’s because the notifications bell icon can’t clear the little dot that means messages pending. It’s on all the time, but there are no messages pending. Basically, at this point, I’m pretty disgusted and done with WP.
But first let’s have at least one more edition of Friday Notes.
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9 Comments | tags: Apple Corporation, art, Bentley, stats, Substack, The Jazz Avengers, WordPress | posted in Friday Notes, Movies
Between it being kind of a weird month (on several counts), my increasing activity on Substack, and some hobby project work, I haven’t posted much here this month. In fact, this is only the second post this month. Given the date, probably the last.
Which may be something of a harbinger. I do seem to be migrating towards Substack and, to some extent, leaving this blog behind. It feels like abandoning a friend, though, and I’m finding it hard to let go. And probably won’t, at least not entirely.
But who knows. Maybe it’s all Friday Notes from here on out…
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6 Comments | tags: blog, blogger, blogging, Service Today, smoke alarm, Tim Walz, WordPress | posted in Friday Notes, Politics
I’ve been sitting on a fence for several months now, and it’s starting to get a bit uncomfortable. Back in March I opened branch office over in Substack land. Ever since I’ve been trying to figure out whether to shift operations there or remain here. (Or try to do both more or less equally.)
A complicating factor is that, despite both Substack and WordPress being blogging platforms, there is something of an apples and pumpkins comparison. They have, for me, contrasting pros and cons, mead and poison.
Change is hard, but it can also be invigorating, and it might just be time.
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6 Comments | tags: blog, blogger, blogging, human consciousness, Roger Penrose, Substack, WordPress | posted in Computers, Life, TV Tuesday, Writing
It’s hard to believe I haven’t yet posted about the Robert Burns (1759-1796) poem, “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785”. Written, obviously, in 1785. It’s one of my favorites, and as with some of my other favorites, due in part to one line, the immortal words: “The best-laid schemes of mice and men; Go oft awry.”
And don’t they indeed. God (or fate or chance or whathaveyou) laughs at our puny plans.
It’s a short poem, and I don’t have all that much to say about it, so I’ll also tell you about an interesting bug in the new WordPress Jetpack app that lets you game your own stats.
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6 Comments | tags: Jetpack app, Robert Burns, To A Mouse, WordPress | posted in Quotes, Writing
Not too long ago I wrote about an apparent issue between posts written in the Classic Editor and how the WordPress Reader sometimes displays them with no paragraph breaks. The post looks fine on the blog’s website, but the WP Reader isn’t recognizing its paragraphs. (This problem still hasn’t been fixed, and I continue to notice posts where it obviously happened.)
That post went longer than I expected because I had to explain the HTML aspects of why the problem seems to happen and how to go about trying to correct it. I meant to get into other foibles of the Reader but ran out of room.
This post adds an extra room just for the WP Reader.
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34 Comments | tags: comma-separated values, CSV, WordPress, WordPress Reader | posted in Opinion, Rant
The post’s title has more the sense of Ali vs Foreman than of Coke vs Pepsi. True, both are contests, but the the latter is a selection — the former is a fight. This post is about a major problem some posts created using the Classic Editor have when displayed in the WordPress Reader.
Specifically, breaks between paragraphs are lost. In some cases an entire post becomes one long paragraph. The only breaks come from the various HTML block elements that force paragraph breaks. (Things like horizontal rules, large images, or tables.)
Here I’ll explain what’s going on and how to get your paragraphs back.
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38 Comments | tags: blog, blogging, Classic Editor, WordPress, WordPress Reader | posted in Rant, Writing
So. 2020. The start of a new decade. That’s just a bit surreal for me. I can remember wondering if 1984 would turn out anything like the novel. The future did turn out a bit like Orwell’s vision — it just took until 2016 or so to get there. It isn’t so much that Big Brother is watching (although, that too), but how our government corrupts and perverts facts and truth.
Good fiction is insightful about the human condition; good science fiction is insightful about our future. Over time, as advertised, the prescient film Idiocracy goes from SF comedy to anthropological documentary. Many others went from fiction to fact. (Fortunately, at least so far, The Terminator has not.)
Suffice to say, this year will seem surreal in more ways than one.
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5 Comments | tags: 1984, 2001, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2020, blog, blogging, George Orwell, Janus, Mandelbrot, Nineteen Eighty-Four, WordPress | posted in Life
Today I want to tie up last time’s post about animation before moving on to other things. I’m sure I’ll return to the topic of making movies with POV-Ray and FFmpeg; it’s just too much fun, and I have tons of ideas. (I can finally do a really decent animation for the Special Relativity article I’m planning for Albert’s birthday.)
Firstly, I’ll discuss the animation initialization file, the ANI.INI file, and show you how the multiple segments are managed. Secondly, I’ll talk about the output files — all those frames we generate — and what to do with them.
Plus, I have a couple of important announcements!
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Leave a comment | tags: ffmpeg, INI file, Irfanview, making movies, mp4, mpeg, POV-Ray, video, WordPress, WordPress Upgrade, YouTube | posted in Computers, Sideband
Dateline: Monday. The little-known eclectic blogger, Wyrd Smythe, had no idea that his blogging provider, a mysterious global enterprise known as “WordPress” (a possible anagram for “Sword Reps”), had granted him extreme power over the weather. At this time, we cannot report whether this was a deliberate seasonal gift, or if the power somehow escaped the control of its owners. Neither can we report on how many this may affect.
What we do know is this: On Monday, when the unsuspecting blogger clicked the “Let It Snow” checkbox on his settings page, sure enough, a gentle snow fall began on his posts. That was the desired and expected effect. What happened next, however, was a surprise.
It also began to snow outside for the first time this season!
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15 Comments | tags: blog, blogger, blogging, drought, farmers, humor, Minnesota, mischief, rain, rain storm, snow, snow checkbox, Spiderman, Sword Reps, weather, winter, WordPress | posted in Life
As I’ve posted articles recently, it’s been impossible to not to notice a looming milestone: post #300! Which is what this one is. At least, it’s the 300th post on this blog. The double qualifier is because there are a number of pages not included in that count, and because I had a go at a baseball blog before I started this one. (Plus, I have another blog with a small number of posts.)
On top of all that, there’s all the stuff I wrote on Newsvine and other online forums, not to mention several personal website incarnations. And I can’t even begin to number how much I wrote for work over the years; there were four websites I authored and countless user and technical documents.
But still… 300 Logos Con Carne posts, that’s not nothing!
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11 Comments | tags: 300, blogging, bowling, CSS, HTML, stylesheets, Watchmen, WordPress, XML file, XSLT, Zack Snyder | posted in Computers, Movies
Logos con carne 