I know, I know, you’re picturing me wandering through the Austrian hills singing about WordPress right now, aren’t you? No worries, I’ll wait over here at my computer keyboard while you think of raindrops on roses.
Oh, you’re done? Okay, good. In my last post (Deciding to play with Blocks as an adult), I gave a bit of intro to my decision to finally use the Block Editor on my website. Consistent design for a series of posts, a little bit of improved styling on my overall blog, and some improved efficiencies in workflow got me over the early molehills and ready to conquer the mountain.
Default blocks
The Block Editor comes with a healthy series of default built-in blocks, ready for anyone with WordPress installed to start using. The overarching “base block” is the PARAGRAPH block. In effect, this is like your “NORMAL” paragraph style in Word. If you start typing, this is the block it uses. It is designed for text, and there is some basic formatting available. Mostly things like BOLD, UNDERLINE, colour, etc. Some are at the top of the page, some are in the admin sidebar. ** Note, you only see these if you are in the BLOCK EDITOR mode; if you are in CLASSIC EDITOR mode, it looks like it always did…white text with a style ribbon at the top (like Word).
The second one is Heading block, and it is really nothing more than applying the HEADING style to a bit of text. Pretty basic.
Once you add an IMAGE BLOCK, things get more interesting. For example, it gives you the option to turn your image into a circle layout, something Classic Editor didn’t ever do easily. Not much more in the way of formatting, but decent improvement. An option to create a GALLERY is there, with pagination, but nothing amazing about it. Any decent gallery plugin will do the same, including JetPack.
Further options include a stylized LIST with a few more styling options than normal, a sample AUDIO block that I doubt I will ever use, another image block option that looks a lot like a header called COVER (large images, ability to put text over top of it, like a banner), a FILE block that allows you to click for downloadable content (for which I already have a better plugin), a decent VIDEO block, some basic TABLE options, SEPARATORS / DIVIDERS dividers for content, some CUSTOM HTML text, a strange VERSE block (to publish poetry and control ASCII layout), a couple of decent CITATION and PULLQUOTE layouts that improve considerably on the old QUOTE options, a BUTTON (nowhere near as good as most plugins or shortcodes), some options to have multiple COLUMNS of varying widths (including styling for background colour), options to add a group / “more” or “page break” / spacing options or insert various WIDGETS, and natural embeds from a long list of popular websites.
Out of all of them? I would use the base paragraph block, heading, image block (although rarely), the video block, and one more…there is a MEDIA AND TEXT block that lets you insert an image and put text beside it, as well as some basic formatting of the overall block. That isn’t completely easy to do in CLASSIC EDITOR. I don’t think it gives me enough styling options, but it lays out simply and nicely:
Media to the left, text to the right, un resized. Colour settings allowed.
JetPack
The JetPack plugin adds some extra functionality too. Much of the added functionality is around the ability to embed material from Google Calendar, Calendly, Eventbrite, Map, Markdown, OpenTable, Pinterest, Recurring Payments, Repeat Visitor, and Revue. I could, in theory, see a benefit to embedding a calendar entry or a map int eh future, but the rest are worthless to me.
It also adds options for some extra tools tools like a subscription form (already covered by a better plugin) or slideshows and tiled galleries (already covered). That really only left me two I could, in theory, use. One is another embed option, but this one is from a huge library of GIFs available online. Normally people have these GIFs in their social media accounts or chat messages. This plugin adds it for your website.
Of course one would have to use it sparingly for it to be useful. Another plugin I liked was called Star Rating, and I would consider it for my Book Reviews and other things, if I didn’t already have a better way to show that.
Classic Paragraph
Last, but not least, I’m including a block that is added by CLASSIC EDITOR. You get one called CLASSIC PARAGRAPH, which is a simple paragraph option but it gives you your full formatting style bar back. Also, while a single default PARAGRAPH is one paragraph per block, CLASSIC PARAGRAPH can have entire posts or pages within them, if you want. It’s better to separate the paragraphs though as you can then move any paragraph around with a click of a button.
Overall? I can get it to do what I want, but I feel constrained still, even with Classic Editor that lets me do anything, without giving me a ton of extra functionality that I’ll use right away.
But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a really scary button. There are some built-in layout options that come with the defaults, and it is like having templates in Word that you DL from the ‘net. Or buying a theme for your overall site. It is a collection of “sets of nicely formatted and grouped blocks” that with a click of a button will give you an advanced layout.
For me, it is scary because it is not something small like tweaking a block or a paragraph here or there. This embeds huge swaths of design elements all at once — with no real regard for whether any of it fits within your default theme’s settings. It’s powerful, sure, but it seems like an overly blunt tool to me. Some would give you a good starting point though. In the meantime, let’s try some other BLOCK PLUGINS.
Update:To see my current collection of blocks, check out the blocks I use.
My wife’s friend’s husband, James, has started a blog and will be blogging about his experiences growing up in Ontario with some expected emphasis on simpler pleasures of childhood like toys, comic books, and TV shows (you can check out his blog here –> https://70scanadianmanboy.com/). The premise got me thinking about some topics I have had in mind for a while, as well as “toys” I have now, and it led me down a rabbit hole thinking about my current website.
I do have the tendency from time to time to “just play”. And I recently decided to revert to my own childhood and play with Blocks.
When WordPress went to version 5, they switched from a classic editor interface to a more graphical one called Blocks. The basic premise was that they were upgrading from a word processing program (like Word) to a graphical layout program (like Publisher). And like Publisher, it focuses less on the words and content and more on how all the elements fit together — page layout and design.
But outside of the virtual world, I have Word and Publisher at home. And I never use Publisher. I have no need for it, as I can do everything I want to do in a program like Word. Truth be told, I suspect about 80% of the people using Word don’t know how to use more than about 10% of its power. And that was the rub for me with Blocks.
Entry into the World of Blocks
I did not transition gracefully to the block editor when WordPress v. 5 released and they dropped the classic editor as the default. I immediately did what most people did, which is add Classic Editor as a plugin. And promptly went right back to using my admin site exactly as I had before. That was 2 years ago.
Since then, I’ve seen lots of stuff on Blocks, but most of it is irrelevant to what I do, which is regular blog entries. Not a lot of formatting involved, nor page layout, and to the extent that there is, I tend to fix it by designing one page/post I like and then just duplicating a template version of it whenever I need a similar layout.
If you’re an experienced Block user, and a convert to the Cult of Blocks (trademark pending), you’re likely sputtering, “But, but, but…”. Yes, of course, I *could* do all those things with a Block editor. But like using Word for my documents instead of a desktop publishing program, I didn’t need to, my trusty Classic Editor worked just fine.
About two months ago, my resolve to stick with the CE started to weaken. It’s a slippery slope to want something to look just a little bit better, for the design to be a bit more consistent in look and feel, or for a workflow to be just a little more efficient. And I slid all the way to the bottom.
In terms of looking a little better, I saw a design about 5 years ago where a website put the date out to the left of the content, stylized it to look like a Google Calendar button, and coloured it in red and white so it would “pop”. I’ve seen other themes do the same, but almost always with some fatal flaws. Not the least of which is that it often had just the month and day, no year. That goes against every grain in my design fibre, having a date like “March 15th” and not knowing which year it was. Many do it deliberately to fake something looking more modern/up-to-date — the post could be 10 years old, but the date makes you think it was more recent. But I thought it was still cool, and I wanted it on my site if I could. With Blocks allowing you to control and format layouts, could I do that with my site? It had made me curious for awhile. Sure, 200 BRs provide a lot of friction to sliding, but if the slope is steep enough, any friction can be overcome by momentum.
In terms of consistency in design, I have Book Reviews on my site, and I’ve either chosen or been forced to change the layout and content of my BRs for varying purposes 3 previous times. When there were only 20 reviews and again when there were about 50 reviews, I changed my approach and content for my reviews, and it wasn’t a big deal to quickly go through them, open them up, tweak the layout, close them down, and be done. I did the same when there was around 100 because of something dramatic that Amazon changed in the way I could link to images of book covers. When I finished, I ticked a box to say “done” and fully expected to continue on my merry little way with that template / layout until I die. I know consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but I like the idea of a consistent look. So I was determined not to change it again unless something dramatic happened or I was forced to change it. And even then, I thought, “No going back. Old ones stay as they are.”
Yet, over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with the back-end of my site for TV Reviews and Movie Reviews. And that process has given me insights into how I layout my Book Reviews, with some alternatives that I didn’t do before. But the TV Reviews and Movie Reviews have different elements, and as I figured out how to do those, I realized that I had some inconsistent layout in my BRs too. Plus I could upgrade an element of design.
Finally, the inefficiencies in workflow were brought home when I attended a virtual WordPress camp from San Antonio a couple of weeks back. I joined the web conference specifically to get a better feel for Blocks, and while I misjudged a few sessions and their likely relevance, one that was more about workflow showed incidental uses of Blocks that were quite useful. Ways, for example, to create and save a “reusable” block in my template for use in all my Book Reviews — and if I later want to edit and tweak it? It will make the change across ALL of the BRs. Plus I found a way to collapse my BR index from six separate pages to a single sortable one, complete with filters too, and that requires a change to all 200 BRs to make them consistent. I could “cheat” and create a redirect, but it wouldn’t look right. At least not to me.
So I put on my deep water waders and headed away from my safe shores into Lake Block. In my next post, I’ll talk about learning to swim again, but I’m still alive, and switching from one editor to another quite frequently. Later I’ll even talk about the calendar “block”.
Update:To see my current collection of blocks, check out the blocks I use.
As I mentioned, I’ve been trying out various blocks in WordPress, and I’m starting with the default ones pre-programmed with Gutenberg’s basic install.
There are a number of blocks that I quite like:
regular paragraph (although I’d like more Tiny MCE buttons);
classic paragraph (boring, but not much choice but to keep it with all my old posts);
headers (dead simple, adds structure to the page);
NGG gallery (my images didn’t have captions for some reason but I like the extra container controls);
video block (simple container);
code block (I don’t really have much use for it, but easier than trying to put it in a pull quote);
basic button (radius for corners, multiple colours, and, more importantly, it autofills links to pages and posts on the site);
columns (feels like I’m on a site like Shutterfly choosing page layouts…I love the power, just not sure when I would use it too much, but admittedly the background colour options are really nice);
embed (pretty powerful, lots of options, including things like embedding a tweet);
I’m on the fence for a few others:
image block (I already use NGG for everything image related, but it has the option to change the image to a circle too!);
quote block (different sizes, but the citation isn’t as controllable);
cover block (a large page with the option to change opacity and add a title overtop, great for previews and sliders, but I don’t really need it);
file block (allows easy downloads, but I have a download manager that handles it just as well, and tracks traffic);
dividers (great for the small one, and the wide one, not sure about the three dots);
table (nothing special, although stripes is easy);
custom HTML (rarely have use for it, except when I’m embedding things);
pullquote (good simple info box);
verse (allows you basically a quick and dirty courier / ASCII layout, but not sure why);
media and text (I should love this one, but I just found the granularity for the image controls and text a bit weak);
Other ones, I don’t particularly like:
gallery from media library (no use for it when I have NGG);
list block (boring!);
audio block (no use for it);
preformatted (boring!);
I didn’t try the GROUP, MORE, or PAGE BREAK ones as I have no real use for them. Same with widgets that allow me to add widgets, shortcodes, archives, calendar, categories, comments, posts, RSS, and search — can’t think of when I would ever post them in a post or page.
I have YOAST installed, and it adds a few default ones too, including FAQ and a how-to layout for step by step instructions. Could prove useful, although I don’t have an immediate need.
Jetpack adds GIFs (mildly interesting) and a five-star rating system (too basic). On to the other block plugin options!
Update:To see my current collection of blocks, check out the blocks I use.
I participated in the overview of WordPress (WP 101 in the WordCamp for San Antonio, TX) that was done virtually this weekend, with two goals in mind…learn more about custom post types and figure out how to transition from classic editor to block editor.
I’ve literally had a mental “block” about switching to the block editor. I played with it initially just long enough to get confused, I wasn’t sure about how to align things, all my settings to tweak seemed to disappear, etc. I felt like it was giving me a lot of power over page layout like a graphics layout program used to do for printing paper when all I really wanted/needed was the digital equivalent of a typewriter. Maybe a few graphics to stick in here and there. Certainly things that I could easily do in something like Word without going for the full layout manager of another program.
I didn’t get to do much with custom post types, but I did watch an overview of blocks. And with the number of posts and themes that are going the way of blocks, well, I need to figure this out sooner rather than later. Particularly if I’m going to transform some layouts of things like book reviews that I’m in the process of tweaking right now anyway.
Blame it on the book reviews
My book reviews have a pretty stable layout overall:
An image that I pull from Good Reads via HTML and that will take me to the GR site if I click on it;
Three sections of text – Plot / Premise; What I liked; What I didn’t like;
My multi-star review;
A text bottom line of a few words;
Links to GoodReads site;
Links to my index of other book reviews; and,
My closing / signoff.
But I’ve made some tweaks before when I had about 90 reviews; again when I had about 130; and again now that I have 180. Each time, I’ve had to go back and reformat quite a bit. So, of course, it makes me wonder…would a block layout let me “fix” it once and move on? The short answer is that in many ways, this is EXACTLY one of three elements that a block editor will give you. So with the book reviews in play, I’m motivated to fix it once.
Options with the block editor
The block editor allows me to have a consistent look and feel (goal 1) while having a lot more flexibility (goal 2). But it is goal 3 that is the most exciting — creating reusable blocks that can be dropped into a post or page, and if later you want to edit it, it will update across all of the site. Sort of like a macro.
For the image, I paste / embed an image from Good Reads, and GR gives me the code to use for embedding. The only real “tweak” I do to it is to increase the size to a specific width. Ideally, I would put the code in a wrap container, it would resize the image, and voila, it would sit there perfectly in the same spot. I can even “save” it as a special block and reuse it, potentially.
For the three headings, they never change so I can preprogram them and set specific font and heading size. If I ever want to change them, as long as I save them as separate reusable chunks, they’ll stay put. If I change one, it will change them all. Similarly, I can add in three paragraph blocks just after them, although those will change.
For the review, some of the block plugins come with review formats, but I kinda like my “reading frog” image. So I’ll likely stick with that. I *could* play with the format and look/feel for a 1 star / 2 star / etc setup and save those. Then, if I ever decide to ditch the frog and go with stars, for example, I just need to edit the block and they’ll all change.
The bottom line is a set header plus a flexible paragraph text, so again, pretty straightforward.
Where things might get interesting is the Good Reads link. Like the image, it is a set “format” but not a set block (the link would be different each time). However, the link to my other reviews is a set block that can be reused easily.
And then there’s my signoff block. It is a standard element I use ALL the time. So it will definitely get turned into a reusable block. And give me maximum flexibility for the future.
Enter the block plugins
The default Gutenberg editor has a lot of default blocks, and they are more than enough to get me going for testing things. But not all blocks can be converted to all other types of blocks, so I don’t want to get too far down the testing and then find another block plugin has this awesome additional block that is perfect for my Good Reads images, for example. So I’m working through a bunch of the main block options.
Update: To see my current collection of blocks, check out the blocks I use.
I’m sure my wife saw the post title and started social distancing just for that. “Not again!” was likely her thought. It’s true, I do play with some stuff on the site, often figuring out new ways to do something, and since I’m anal-retentive, I hate the thought of something that leaving previous versions if, say, I find a better way to do book reviews that I would implement starting now.
Simple content areas
Most of my content is relatively straightforward — a blog post here, a blog post there. For each, they are pretty text-heavy even if the popular website wisdom is more graphics and video. That’s not me, I’m a writer, I write words. But there are a few areas where I feel the choices for how to display the text are not quite so clear; for the simple areas, it is relatively, umm, simple.
For astronomy, I share my own pics of course, but I’m also writing an astronomy guide. So having a simplified layout that is easy for anyone to read is important to me. Mostly so far it is only a table of contents and a series of early pages or blog posts. I can do them as either (post or page), really, but most are done as pages.
For my challenges (reading, baking/cooking), they’re relatively simple static pages.
For materials related to government, much of it is simply one-off posts, no real structure required. But then I have two other areas…the first is PS Transitions FP, a report from a conference that a group of students from Carleton organized in 2002, and for which I was the webmaster. It’s entirely static, but it does have some tabbing in it, as well as a photo gallery. I’ve kept the content there for over 18 years, but the methodology for doing so has had to be altered a little bit when plugins expired, or setups on my site changed.
The other area is my HR guide, and it has been a challenge more for organizing than content, at least in terms of the website portion. I have multiple versions of some of the content, with a LOT of comments on pages that I now consider archival. I hesitate to delete them and lose all those comments, but I don’t like having the old versions of the guide there when I’ve written later and better versions. I recently found a plugin that will let me move comments from an old post to my latest post on the same topic, and I’ll likely consolidate it all when I get my latest version of the guide finished. My wife is acting as my editor, so I’m hopeful it will be my best version yet. And then I’ll likely delete all the other content. The thought makes me queasy, to be honest. All those words, used extensively by people, but I’m going to delete entire posts and pages? I haven’t worked through that mentally yet. I might find a way to preserve it somewhere else on the site.
Under personal, I have posts about family and goals, all relatively straight-forward. But the ones for humour and quotes give me pause. I like the idea of sharing both through social media as memes. And then including them on my website. Sounds simple, right? Except if I do it as a meme, i.e. a graphic, then the graphic doesn’t get indexed on my site. Index bots don’t read the “text” within the graphic, it is just the graphic. So if I add a long joke, or even a short quote, and someone was to search anywhere for it, my site wouldn’t show up in the search engine because technically that text doesn’t appear on my site. Yet, by the same token, if I post it as text, it doesn’t look as sharp as a meme, suitable for sharing. Someone suggested including both, but that seems redundant. However, I might have a new way to at least create a searchable list of the description of the meme at least. A bit manual to create at first, but ongoing would be simple to update for future posts.
The more difficult areas to format
The real challenge has always been my reviews. Before I even had a website, I wrote book and movie reviews and just shared them along with jokes to a subscription-based newsletter list. It was free, but you had to “ask” to be on it. I had book reviews, movie reviews, jokes, and an active trivia game at the time. Most of it was in a spreadsheet that handled all my formatting in ASCII format so I could paste into an email and just pressed SEND. It worked, I liked it, and when I created my first PolyWogg website, I wanted to put my reviews there.
Of late, though, I have mostly focused on book reviews. I generally have liked the format for them (plot / premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, bottom line, rating), and yet I confess it took me several tries to get them looking the way I wanted. One of the early challenges was whether or not I include a “disclosure” phrase in the review on my own website. You’re supposed to declare any conflict-of-interest elements if you post reviews on a lot of commercial sites, and since I share them on those sites too, it seemed simple to also include them on mine. But over time, I realized I didn’t really care. For almost none of them do I have any conflict. I don’t have that many cases where I got a free book / advanced reader copy to read. So the disclosure was bulky and just said that I had no link to the author. Kind of meaningless in the long-run. I cut it.
Then Amazon started playing with how they handle referral links. I didn’t have a lot of links on my site, and so I wasn’t getting any referral money. I think I got about a dollar over five years. But I did have the account, and the main point of having it was so I could link to the Amazon website and hotlink in pictures of the book covers. Yet Amazon booted me from the active referral program along with 1000s of other affiliates who hadn’t earned any commissions in the previous year. They culled the list, so to speak, and I would have cut me too. But that called into question my hotlinking, which also required me to run two extra plugins. Could I get the images some other way? Yep, Good Reads grants permission to those doing reviews to link to the images on their own site. Yes! So I went through probably 150 or so book reviews, reformatting a few things as I went (like cutting disclosure paragraphs) and updating all the images. Tedious, but they were all “fixed” to match the new approach. That was about six months ago.
The part that was “left” was my index of book reviews. I had tried some indexing tools, some table plugins, a few other things, and none of them really worked the way I wanted them to do. Because I had different types of info that I wanted to be able to group by:
Alphabetically by title (obvious);
Alphabetically by author;
The raw review number (i.e., mostly chronologically for me for the order in which I write the reviews);
The date of my review (where #3 failed is some of my reviews are old and I’ve updated them and included them, but that means putting in a 1998 review in between two 2015 reviews, for example, so #3 and #4 are not exactly the same sort);
The year the book was published;
Series and order, to give me the ability to group books in the same series; and,
My rating.
But without the proper tool to display all of that, I organize it manually. I still use a flat-file database in a spreadsheet, Excel currently, although it started off in Lotus 1-2-3 years ago, and in the spreadsheet, I have a field that formats the info so I can simply paste it into my website. For example, I mix and match sub-fields into a single string that says:
TITLE by AUTHOR (BR#####; published {date}; reviewed {date}; series {order}; rating)
I then simply paste that into one page, add a hotlink to the URL for the review post, and then copy that to six other index pages. I have tended to do it in batches of twenty-five book reviews at a time, so I would write 25 reviews and post them over the course of a number of months, and when I got to the 25th, I would then paste all 25 strings into a web-page, add the URLs, and then paste them into the other six pages too. Time-consuming, and doing 25 together made it a bit more efficient on workflows, but it was a workflow blockage too. Plus, once in awhile, I’d mess up some link or a copy and paste, and then a year later, I would happen to notice that the link from one of the indices was not, in fact, linking to the right page. I’d messed it up, and when I beta-tested it, I had apparently missed the errors. REALLY annoying. Another downside to coding some things manually.
As I said, though, I had tried out a bunch of options to put it into various auto-sorting tools, but it never worked well.
An accidental revolution
In addition to my book reviews, I also do movie reviews, music reviews (although mainly only one year so far), and TV reviews. For the TV reviews, it is INCREDIBLY slow to do a review of a full season of TV for me. Which is odd, because the individual episodes are ALREADY reviewed. As I watch TV, I keep track of individual episodes and when I finish the episode, I use a similar spreadsheet to automate a quick TWEET that says:
Sooo, I have always wanted to embed those reviews in my website, but didn’t have a good way to do that, at least not quickly. I tried a manual approach:
Created a table in a reusable post template;
Added a line for the Tweet;
Added a line for a picture from the episode (I was saving them for a while);
Added some areas to talk about the overall season;
Added an area to rate the whole season;
But then I was stuck. That is a LOT of copy and pasting to get it to look right. I tried just pasting from Excel spreadsheets, but the paste is painful — it adds codes to EVERY cell, so if you want to adjust layout later, the whole table is a mess of codes. So I went looking for a way to embed an Excel Spreadsheet into a website easily. Just so I could paste, for example, a whole season’s worth of tweet/reviews at once.
And I found the very popular plugin for WordPress called TablePress. It would allow me to import spreadsheets directly or even to paste them raw. Gave it a try, and BAM, it worked right out of the box. Great, I had a way to paste the whole season at once into a page.
But then I noticed some other features. It would let me search the table too, applying the terms like a filter. Not really needed in a table of only 20-25 rows, but interesting. Oh, and you can sort columns too. Again, I don’t really need that with the episodes.
Or more accurately, I don’t need that function for THIS table. But what about my book review indices? Holy Hannah, I could have ONE table instead of 7 and EVERY FIELD is sortable? Plus I can paste directly from Excel? Holy fudgicles!
Welcome to the revolution
I only had 8 reviews of TV seasons, all for the show Castle that finished a few years ago. Again, as I said, too time-consuming to paste in every episode line by line, particularly if I was also pasting in photos. Meh. Instead, I’ve cut it down to an overview, episodes that I liked, those that were watchable, those that I didn’t like, a table of all the episodes, an overall review of the season, and some links to the index of other reviews.
With each column sortable. I copy the rows and columns from Excel where I already have the info, paste it all into the back end, add one line to my page, and BAM!, instant table. I started thinking, okay, this is good, I’ll do a table for each season, no problem. But then I thought again. Every table will be identical in format. And Castle has 8 seasons, that’s 8 tables to keep in the database with different names, I’ll need a good naming convention, etc. Hmm…but what if I could merge ALL of the Castle episodes into one table and just list those that correspond to Season 1. Is that doable? Turns out it is. TablePress has a premium extension called row filtering. So now I have pasted ALL of the info for each episode for eight seasons of Castle into the same table, and now instead of saying just “show Castle table”, I also say “filter to S01”. Still all one line.
Now I could get really aggressive, and paste all my shows into one database. Dozens of shows, hundreds of seasons, maybe even thousands of episodes and then filter on “Castle” and “S01”. Yet it would generate a HUGE table in the database. If it corrupts, I’m toast, I’ll lose everything, plus it would be loading the whole table each time it ran a filter. For TV episodes at least, I’ll keep it to one table per show. But once I’ve pasted one season in, the rest can go like gangbusters. A huge workflow saving, and it generates the same way every time.
And it got me thinking about how to do the book reviews.
As I mentioned earlier, I had 7 pages of book review indices generated relatively manually. Now they could be all in one page. Great! Except that all of my existing book review pages have a small table at the end of each that has links to each of the seven pages. All nicely formatted; all no longer needed. In 180 book reviews. The ones I updated 6 months ago to fix the problem with showing the pictures of the book covers. Dang it.
Editing Book Reviews
It really isn’t as bad as it sounds, maybe an hour or two of dedicated processing to open the page, go to the bottom, paste a new line that only links to the main index, and then delete the table for the rest. Easily doable. There likely is a way to do this in the block editor to prevent ever having this need again (i.e. perhaps I could edit the block next time and delete or update all of them at once), but I am not a block-editor kind of guy. I vastly prefer the simple classic editor. So that’s what I’ve done. But I went through my layout in detail asking myself if there is ANYTHING else I might want to change as I go. My ratings show as pictures of a frog reading on a lilypad, and if it is four out of five, it shows four green ones and one grey one, for instance. On all of my other reviews, TV / Movies / Music, I’m switching my ratings from an actual graphic file over to a simple icon / emoji of a smiling frog. So four green frogs and one grey circle, for 4/5. It looks simpler, shows up cleaner in tweets and FB, kind of cute. I like the branding. But for my book reviews, I like the graphic of the frog reading. So I am committing to that staying. I’ll use the frog emoji in tables, like above, but for the rest, it is graphics.
While I was playing with this, I also adjusted my movie reviews, even though for that too there are only a handful. Too hard to do the workflow, or so I thought. Now that I have an easily updatable table, it’s not that bad.
My other big tweak
A few months ago, I started the process of switching all of my photos from a separate Piwigo install on my website into a WordPress-based NextGen Gallery that embeds all the photos into the site. The integration is great, but it is a LOT of work to move 13K photos from one server area to another. I’m fixing a whole bunch of stuff on the back end as I go, including how filenames and captions, plus face tagging, are done, and I’m using Mylio as by desktop photo processor along with its built-in facial recognition. That has a small impact on my movie and TV reviews as I do include some photos for those (like the show’s title screen and a pic or two from an episode somewhere in the season). It’s working well, but I’m a bit stalled on the “big” move. Still a LONG way to go on the regular personal photos, not to mention astronomy photos later. Yikes.
Conclusion
And that’s where I am. TablePress as a major change, plus its extension for filtering + I’ve reformatted the entire approach to reviews + I’m using a new gallery plugin on the backend. But I’m really happy with the approach, for the first time in a long time. I feel like there aren’t any niggling elements on any of the review contents, or the others really, where I don’t have the approach I want. No “unresolved” issues like manually having to do multiple index pages rather than having the system generate it for me.
