May 2020 – The PolyBlog

The button block I use in WordPress

May 31 2020

All of the main block collections come with a “button” block (default blocks, Advanced Gutenberg, Atomic Blocks, Kadence, Qodeblock, Stackable, and Ultimate Addons). The purpose is simple — add some text, add a URL, add some styling, and when the user clicks on it, it goes to the link.

The default Buttons block is relatively simple, as most of them are…you can choose whether it opens in the same window or a new window, the size of the button (small, medium, large or extra-large), the button shape (square, rounded square or circular — more like ovals), button colour, and text colour, and of course the URL. Easier than using shortcodes as I used to have to do before Gutenberg. They work, they’re functional, but the real challenge is they only really work if you want one. Which is ironic since they name the block in the plural, but do not have any options to put several side-by-side, unless you wrap them in some sort of table or other type grid block.

Kadence calls their block Advanced Button and it solves the challenge of having multiple buttons side by side right off the bat. You can set the number of buttons and then align the group to the left, right or centred. After that, each button has its own options — text size, button size (with paddings), button width, hover options, backgrounds, borders, colours, and spacing before the next button. You can even add an icon inside the button. It has almost everything you would want, and definitely more than the default.

Advanced Gutenberg also calls their button block the Advanced Button and seems to have a few more initial styles (default, outlined, squared, squared outline) but when you look at them more closely, you see that it is really a round one or squared one, with either the button filled or just an outline. Text and fill colours are standard options, but I like the 8 different types of borders it offers. Except I have no real need for dotted button borders. Not sure I ever would.

Atomic Blocks and Qodeblock both just call their block Button and they are almost as basic as the default one.

Ultimate has two button blocks, one called Multi Buttons and one called Marketing Button. Multi sets you up with two initially and a click of a button will add more across the page. Each one starts off pretty basic, and you can tweak colours for the text, background, border, and hover. And, as mentioned above, you can change border weight and type (solid, dashed, etc.) for each button. By contrast, the Marketing Button is a little more robust. It is designed to be a single button on the row, but you have the ability to add a button icon to help style your “call to action”, change the typography of the text which has two lines — one title, one description — as well as all the colour attributes. Pretty decent, and the only option that allows you “officially” two lines of text…however, most of the others allow a second row if you just hit a hard enter in the main text.

Stackable by contrast does its usual job of blowing the doors off the competition. It starts with them just calling it “button” (singular), but there are five separate layouts as soon as you create one. The layout shows three and it gives you the option of three basic buttons side-by-side, three spread farther apart across the page, one going the full width of the page, and then, just for fun, options to group the set of three so there are two to the right and one to the left or one to the right and two to the left. Way beyond anything the others were offering. Of course, Stackable also gives you some specific designs to get you started…One option they include is a button that doesn’t look like a button, whereby they have two that are styled as different colours, standard looking buttons, and then the third one just says “Learn More” and looks like a link. However, it is a third button — with transparent background, no border, and no fill. Until you hover over it. My only lament is that you are limited to three buttons. And since it is Stackable, you can massage the heck out of all the settings for typography, backgrounds for the block, spacing, separators, etc. Yeah, yeah, same old, same old awesome. Of course, I’m keeping this one.

But I’m also going to keep “multi-buttons” in case I need a simple option that goes above 3.

Update: To see my current collection of blocks, check out the blocks I use.

Metaliteracy – Week 4 – Creating a digital artifact

May 21 2020

The final assignment for the course, “Metaliteracy: Empowering yourself in a connected world”, is to create a digital artifact of some kind — a story, video, podcast, etc. — tied to the theme of metaliteracy, metacognition, and the topics of the previous 3 weeks. The goal is to help teach some aspect of it to someone else. For me, one of the most interesting areas of metaliteracy falls into the area of ethics. And I think I have something unique to say.

Metaliteracy and Ethics

It’s quite interesting that so many people talk about the “ethical use of information” on the internet and in journals, on talk shows and in lecture halls. Yet none of them seem to stop to ask themselves what they mean by ethics? In most cases, the explanation is quite simply “do no harm” or “don’t do bad things with the info”. It is akin to Google’s slogan, “Don’t be evil”. Except that isn’t really about ethics so much as simple right and wrong. Following the law, or just not doing something wrong, is not really an ethical dilemma.

Ethics is much better understood where two principles that are both positive come into conflict. For example, as a physician during Covid-19, you want to protect the health of other patients and citizens but you also want to protect the privacy of an individual. While it might be efficient to just publish the names of someone who was sick, and let anyone else know, the point is not “who” they were exposed to but that they were exposed by being in contact with someone. As such, much of the tracing behaviour for people doesn’t reveal who was sick, just that “someone” they came into contact with was sick. The ethical “solution” is to protect the privacy of the individual who was sick while still ensuring that the people they came into contact with are still notified. It’s the only ethical solution that satisfies both principles — privacy and protection.

Yet when it comes to the area of metaliteracy and our roles within the field, it is where those roles are in conflict that ethics is needed to help resolve them. If we look at the materials provided in the course, we can see nine defined roles for a metaliterate learner (in the outer ring):

(Coursera course, **Metaliteracy: Empowering Yourself in a Connected World**, Week 3, video resource, “Empowered Metaliterate Learning”, frame at 2m09s, as captured from https://www.coursera.org/learn/metaliteracy/lecture/rXsGo/empowered-metaliterate-learning-2-09 on May 21, 2020).

Many people assume, and the course reinforces this assumption, that most of those roles are played at the same time and that they are, for the most part, complementary. But are they completely complementary and if so, also at all times?

I’ll give an example from my undergraduate work at Trent University back in 1988-89. As part of a course on organizational theory, we were divided into some fairly large groups, and ours had about 20-25 people in it. Our project was to look at control structures, both informal and formal, in 2-3 companies and to use them as case studies to present to the rest of the class as “contrast and compare” examples. This put us all in a collaborative role, also all doing research, participating as well, and ultimately as author/publisher. It seems straight-forward, but we quickly found ourselves with an ethical dilemma in those roles and how we used information.

It may be a bit of a cliché to note that many of these group projects in business studies that work on topics such as control structures frequently become somewhat “meta-projects” themselves. The dynamics in our own group of 20+ business students, many with desires to “lead” or with Type-A personalities, as we tried to come to some form of working consensus on the way forward, how to assign work, who would nominally “lead” when we were all capable of doing so ourselves, turned into an interesting microcosm of the subject matter we were studying.

Five of us had a brainstorm. Wouldn’t it be cool if we created a shadow-report talking about our own experiences within the group? A sort of case-study of the case-study process, or a pseudo-Lord of the (Business) Flies analysis of how we instituted our own control mechanisms. Several of the students were heavily in favour of doing the study. For them, they felt we could resolve any potential ethical issues by removing names from the final report. For two of us, we felt an ethical tug-of-war that we couldn’t name or resolve, and we eventually killed the idea.

Now that I’ve taken the course, the definitions are clearer. It was clear that we were going to be both participant and author in our own research while working on two projects simultaneously — the larger actual project and the smaller meta-project. Yet to be a collaborator in the larger project required us to be collaborators, with key outcomes depending on our ability to form bonds together and to trust each other with what we learned. To share information openly, candidly, honestly with each other as we worked towards a larger project. Yet at the same time, we would be taking notes and hoarding information about the behaviour of our other collaborators in the team, evaluating them, breaking every aspect of that project trust.

At the time, we just felt that it was somehow underhanded and that we could be destroying any trust with our classmates for the coming 2 years of the business program. But if you use the metaliteracy wheel above, focusing on the types of information and the roles being played, the conflict is clearer. And so is an ethical solution that should have presented itself at the time, but didn’t.

The ethical “solution” that would have allowed both projects to continue at the same time and honoured the multiple roles while eliminating the conflicts should have been simple. We could have simply told them up front that we were doing it. We could take our notes, prepare something for the whole group to see and comment upon, and collectively decided whether or not it would be shared with the larger class. An ethical solution to do the same thing we wanted to do in the first place, made possible by simply identifying the clear roles being played, sometimes in overlap. That solution would have been the ethical use of our information, not simply “do no harm”.

There are, however, numerous other potential conflicts in the above model that could be analysed further. The collaborator who wants to share but also wants to publish individually (shared data, multiple artifacts); a translator who must respect the intent of an original creator’s work but who also plays a role as a teacher who transforms that work into more teachable, digestible forms; an author who has a desire to communicate their creations to others, and who has an existing publishing platform (perhaps a blog) that is easy for them to use, yet the ideal scenario for some of the creations may be more of a public domain wiki for multiple people to collaborate in openly.

And that’s it for the four-week course. There appears to be a sequel course, so I may look into that one too. I like auditing these MOOCs.

Metaliteracy – Week 3 – Telling your digital story

May 21 2020

This week’s materials are all about preparing a digital story. It starts with a simple example of telling something personal, maybe including some primary materials, adding in some secondary materials, doing research, planning, and ultimately creating the story in some form.

It takes the view that digital storytelling encompasses lots of different tools — text, pictures, video, etc. — and gives examples of how to do that creation, find the relevant materials, and shares a lot of examples from StoryCorps of how to do that creative process.

I have to say that I found it rather basic. Too much of it is about the tools you can use to tell your story, and not enough time is spent on what the story is…for me, all storytelling starts with the arc. A beginning, a middle, an end. And some sort of purpose to the story — or to sharing the story. Long before I figure out what I’m going to use to tell the story, I need to figure out what story I want to tell. Far too many of these stories that have been created through these digital archive stories are “interesting” but not very effective. Put differently, if they were written stories, they wouldn’t make it out of the slush pile as the stories are more “vignettes” or “slices of life” that don’t go anywhere.

I just didn’t find the week compelling.

Articles I Like: The Waves Of COVID-19 Insurance Claims

May 20 2020

Since I once loved the law enough to do my first year of law school, there are occasionally articles that attract my interest that most people would skip over. One I saw this past week on Above The Law was about insurance claims in the wake of Covid-19. The author noted that the topic isn’t interesting to everyone, but a factoid at the beginning caught my attention:

But I heard something interesting about insurance last week that I just had to share with you: Some European insurance companies are now seeing fewer automobile insurance claims than at any time since World War II. (On second thought, maybe my definition of “interesting” and yours don’t match up precisely.) That gives you an idea of what the pandemic has done to travel across a big swath of the world.
The Waves Of COVID-19 Insurance Claims | Above the Law

But the rest of his article is pretty interesting too, as he noted what he sees as three likely waves of insurance claims:

Travel — in the OP, it argues this one has already passed with people filing claims related to cancelled trips, etc. in the wake of the shut-down. I’m not sure about that, as lots of claims were denied, and now lots of people are fighting about it still.
Property and business interruption claims — the OP notes that most insurance of this sort is geared towards catastrophes that cause property damage and therefore the business has to shut-down. It isn’t clear if insurance policies will cover a non-physical shut-down and the fighting is just beginning. What’s really cool is how it will play out because some of the shut down was legislative so they may order insurance companies to cover the losses!
Working from home claims — cyber insurance for future losses from unsecured operations, employment insurance offered by companies if the shutdowns result in closures, workers’ compensation if employees become ill at work or injured at home, and if companies do shut down, then do they have options for bankruptcy or trade credits beyond the original business disruption insurance?

Looks like a fascinating area for the future…but for me, I think they are missing a huge area that is going to show up fast. Are any of the insurance companies going to try and balk at paying life insurance claims if someone didn’t practice social distancing i.e., they contributed to their own demise?

I don’t want a group/container block in WordPress

May 18 2020

The default blocks in Gutenberg blocks includes a “group” block. Atomic Blocks, Qodeblock and Stackable added their own called “container”. The point of these “parent” blocks is to add a container around a bunch of nested blocks within it. Suppose, for example, you have four blocks that always go together — a header, a paragraph of text, an image, and some links. You could put those four inside a block, and then if you want to move them around a page, you just move the big container block, and all of those sub-blocks / child blocks will move at once. They stay together. Alternatively, where it becomes really useful is if you put the four child blocks in a reusable group block, say for example instructions on how to do something that you frequently refer to in your posts, and you can dump that block in anytime you need it.

While that can also start to make a site look repetitive in a blogging world, one area where it could be useful in my site is the close-out of a book review. At the end of my book reviews, I use to have three things — a set disclaimer about my review (now removed as irrelevant), links to other reviews, and a signature block saying Happy Reading. If I wrapped all three of those together in a reusable group block, I could just paste all three at the end of every BR and be “done”.

To me, though, the real danger is that repetition. You start to think every page is the same, and you just dump something in without thinking about whether all three pieces are appropriate. Take the disclaimer for example. While I could add it to every BR, it was only relevant to a couple. And the more I played with wording and tweaking, the more I realized it was just unnecessary. In a commercial world, people frequently stick in boilerplate info because they “can” without thinking about whether they “should”.

I’m happy to do reusable blocks for various signatures like “Happy reading” or “Clear skies”, as it saves some steps, but grouping too many things together makes me nervous. It honestly encourages lazy design rather than conscious design. I know, I know, I’m likely over-thinking it.

The default Group block has very few settings to tweak, mainly the idea that you group them together but the only thing you can change is a background colour. Nothing terribly exciting.

Atomic Blocks’ Container block adds the ability to do padding and margins, and this COULD be useful, set an overall width on the container (so if some child blocks like to go full-width, you could over-ride their tendencies here by wrapping them in a larger but thinner container). In addition, you can replace the background with an image, not just change the colour. Definitely better than the default. Qodeblocks’ container is identical. You’d swear they were just copies of each other.

From my earlier posts, you already know that I’m in love with Stackable’s approach to just about all of their blocks. So I was excited to see what options they add. Height and width are nice additions, gradients are added to background colours, you can use video instead of an image, separator styling above and below, etc. There are some premium features that allow custom column colours and things like that, but considering I don’t have much need for such a block, and I’m fearful of over-use, I’ll stick with the base options. And I wasn’t disappointed. Stackable adds all of the options that the other three options did, plus some more. Definitely a keeper.

I know, I know, you’re thinking, if you’re not going to use it, why are you keeping it? I’m keeping it simply because I like the option if I need it without having to re-install it. I’ll still be hesitant, but I do like the option of wrapping a background colour behind it. For example, I could excerpt some stuff from other websites or even include segments in posts where I want to highlight several blocks at once. This would be one way to do that.