Previous readers of the blog know that I am intrigued every time I see a new block collection and want to see what they have to offer. I was looking at a new post tool and it listed all the collections it was compatible with, most of which I had seen. But it listed one called “Kioken Blocks” which I had never heard of, so I wanted to give it a try.
It comes with 19 blocks, and so let’s see how they do on my site…
Accordion: Simple vertical accordion block, click to expand;
Container Row: A common block in the higher-end collections, this gives you a quick layout of one row x multiple columns of different size and proportions. It not only has animation options, it lets you customize the look for five different screen sizes, and lots of tweaks to backgrounds for six different columns;
Divider Plus: This is a REALLY well-done block. It has all the standard separator line options — dots, full width, short distance, stars, etc. But then it offers lines with text (you enter the text, it spaces it between two lines across the page), or an icon between two lines, etc.;
Fancy Buttons: Decent enough tweaks, but major selling feature would be that it allows for some transition animation, although I have no desire for such functionality;
Features: Simple box layout to draw attention to features in parallel columns;
Google Maps: Standard block for inserting a Google map with an API key;
Icon: Standard fare, lets you insert icons, although it will let you do up to 10, which is higher than most;
Image Box: Most collections have an image box, this is one of the few that gives you hover and animation options, plus all the normal tweaking options;
Kinetic Wrapper: Same as most collections “group” or “container” options, with added animation;
Kinetic Posts: Options to show recent posts in different layouts with FIs, but most seemed way too big for the layout, but some different options than most;
Numbers Counter: Simple “count up” block to go up to a user-entered value;
Open Table Form: A good layout if you want to embed an Open Table form for a restaurant booking;
Price Line: A basic box with a spot for a title and a description beside it, and the price right-justified;
Split Headings: I wasn’t sure what this was at first, or why I would care, but it basically allows you to have a multi-line heading without needing line wrap;
Tabs: Very basic block;
Testimonials Carousel: Basic testimonial layouts with image, content description, name, title, all wrapped in a carousel;
Video Box: Designed for Vimeo or YouTube insertion, standard fare; and,
Visual List: If you don’t want to use a table, but you want to arrange some items in a list, how about 40 rows by 6 columns? Well, not really, as it limits you to 40 items overall. So more like up to 40 items spread over up to 6 columns. Still, pretty slick setup if you had a bunch of info to list in a grid.
They are mostly all decently-rendered and designed, with a few standouts. Most of them have an extra animation option, which most block collections do not do. And their extra 19th block is for Kioken Elements which lets you load a lot of pre-designed block patterns, with options to upgrade to pro modes.
A decent collection, but none of them screamed “must-have”. If I had to identify the best three, I would say Divider Plus, Visual List, and Split Headings as all three are relatively unique to Kioken, haven’t seen those in other block collections. Unfortunately, I don’t really need any of them enough to keep the collection around.
So, yesterday I wrote about how I was overwhelmed and had, by default, chosen to break instead of bend (Today I choose to break rather than bend (TIC00048d)). A bunch of things were piling up, and when they overwhelmed me, I dropped.
Today, I’m trying to find a bit healthier way to adjust, but I have to start with a negative. For those who have dipped their toe into my posts about “today I choose”, you know that I’m numbering them, and while the numbers go in regular order, I’ve been adding a “series” letter to the end. Those basically are my Seinfeld tracking for the choices — how many days in a row I can go without breaking the chain. Well, although I did indeed make a choice yesterday, even if by default, it was not a positive choice about how I want to live my life. Which means I have to reset again, going from series “d” to series “e”. Not a big deal for anyone but me, but so far I have:
July 5th to July 12th: 8 days in a row
July 16th to August 6th: 9 days
August 7th to August 18th: 12 days
August 20th to September 7th: 18 days
I’m happy to see the chains getting longer, but whether it is making a difference or not, I haven’t been able to assess yet. Soon, I will.
Anyway, the point is that yesterday was a break, as I said, in more ways than one and today I have to restart the chain with series “e”. And with the restart, my choice fell to looking at something that was not really the cause of my break but rather what failed to mitigate it. Namely, my approach to my website.
I confess…
So, if it isn’t obvious, I love having my own blog. With 1.5M words and almost 1500 posts, I also know that I’m probably in the top 10% of all blogs anywhere for production and unique contributions by a single author: me!
I like wrestling with the words of a given topic, figuring out what I want to say, how I want to say it. Putting my stamp on things. I like the fact that I’m up to about 150-200 hits a day even if most of them are here for my HR guide or astronomy help when I’m blogging about lots of other things. I have almost 200 book reviews on the site, ones that I put time and effort into writing and nuancing. Do they get many hits? Hardly. But I love the process.
But managing the website creates some challenges. I never want to commercialize or monetize my site. It will never have advertising nor likely to have affiliate links (tried that for Amazon for a bit, but I didn’t really like it). I am not trying to turn it into a side hustle for money, I don’t want to offer training courses. Maybe, at some point, I’ll turn my writing into sales products, but that is as far as I want to go. So then the question becomes, “What am I willing to invest in the site to keep it personal?”.
I tried other blogging platforms, I like WordPress. But right now there are three things that would improve my website dramatically, and I’m not doing them. First and foremost, I can improve my search engine optimization. I played with that on the weekend, along with the next two items, and it is part of what messed up my site. I used to use YOAST SEO and forget now why I removed it, I think it was conflicting with something I wanted more, and I tried Rank Math over the last few days. Essentially it prompts you on how to structure your pages, and gives you a score for the page. For example, if one of my key words for the site is book review, then it should appear in the title of my post, I should make sure I use the verb review repeatedly including in the title, I should add it as ALT text to any pictures on the page. A lot of stuff that I have ZERO interest in doing.
Because I realized that while I don’t want Google to block me or anything, I really don’t particularly care where I rank on most things. Most people using my site come to my site for MY site, not because of a google search. I’m not serving the world, a page at a time, most people who find my site are doing so because they are looking for something VERY specific to my site, and on those searches, I rank in the top 10. So why am I trying to kill myself on SEO? It’s an enormous amount of work to switch formats over to match what they want, and some things I tweaked and the system still said “0 points” for my tweak. In short, I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m not willing to invest the time and energy for something that is merely a “nice to have”. It’s not what my site is about.
A second thing that is problematic is my use of tables in a few places. They are NOT, as they say, “mobile-friendly”. But equally, some of my other design choices are not mobile-friendly either. I should be running CDN caching, not local caching, so that a fast site like Amazon AWS can serve my graphics and videos much faster than I, all behind the scenes. But I kind of like having my site keep it local. It’s silly, it’s not efficient, the tweaks are easy to make, and I just don’t want to do it because it goes hand in hand with the third element.
Namely page optimization. In other words, my site is slow to load. The infamous “they” recommend that a load times should be under a second. Some of mine go to 3-4 seconds to load the whole page. That’s NOT because I’m wordy, it’s not about the content, not really. Some of it is the local full size images, sure, but most of it is that I’m running a lot of plugins, a lot of things load every page run, I have a lot of style sheets that are getting called, and my HTML file ends up being quite long. None of them are dreadful, but each one slows the overall page a little bit. I tried running some minify scripts over the last couple of days, combined with better remote caching, and a few other tweaks here and there. I was basically following tips / best practices on how to speed up the front end and back end of the site.
I did accomplish it, things sped up. And I hated the way it looked on the front end. Every time the page loaded, for a quarter second, it looked like some stupid DOS based HTML link page with no formatting. Ugly as sh**. And I would really love to not have it be slow, but I don’t know how to fix that, and honestly, I don’t have the time or energy right now to learn.
Let it go, let it goooooo?
So I took a bit of time today during a break from work to undo all the stuff I had done in the last couple of days to try to improve the load times. I didn’t even really remember them all, so I had to go to the tip list and work my way backward undoing certain things. I hadn’t uninstalled the OLD way of doing things, but I had installed a bunch of new stuff that I had to remove. And then reactivate the old stuff.
Hell, I even considered some nuclear options in there first, like blowing everything off and uploading the content fresh again (more like an export / import situation), and I even was considering switching photo galleries or moving everything to Flickr. It sure would make my life easier in many ways, and Flickr will now let me have videos if I want. Tempting. If Mylio’s direct upload to Flickr was working, I’d be seriously tempted to go that route. But in the end, I reset back to the way it was, no need to go nuclear.
It’s a personal site, it’s mainly for me, and if it runs a bit slow, well, f*** it. At least for now. Maybe in a year or two if I feel like it, I’ll hire someone local to upgrade and optimize the site, basically to clean out a lot of crap that is probably clogging the setup. Which sounds simple, just letting it go, but it really isn’t for me.
Is the issue significant to the site? Yes.
Do I care about the site? Absolutely. It’s my in virtual form.
Do I care enough about this issue RIGHT NOW enough to be screwing up my site? No.
If I had a magic wand, I’d do it. But I don’t, and I have to accept I’m not good enough in WP to figure it out, at least not anytime soon, maybe not ever. I could probably renovate the behind the scenes system, strip the walls back to the studs so to speak, but I’m barely keeping my head up. I can’t let it add to my stress nor can I have it failing to mitigate it. I need the f***ing thing working well enough to use, even if it gives me lousy rankings on speed or search engine optimization. I know generally WHAT needs to be done, but not enough about how.
And I just have to let it go. I want it, sure, but I can’t really have it. Kind of like my observatory problem.
The part that is hard to explain is that to accept it, and to let it go, I have to accept that it is beyond my mental abilities to figure out. I can accept that I’ll never do 4D mathematical modelling, sure, nor calculate rocket trajectories into space, but basic setup of a website with WordPress? That SHOULD be something I can figure out, and it’s just not coming together for me. So I’m setting an upper limit on what I can do. I’m setting an artificial cap on my site that it will be “this good” and no better.
I rarely do that. Maybe it’s arrogance, maybe it’s confidence, maybe it’s naivete, but I like to believe the hype that you can do almost anything you put your mind to, outside of physical realities. But this ain’t one of those situations where I can live that belief. My site is about as good as it is going to get unless I pay someone to fix it.
Which leaves me back where I always am, focusing on the content. I can DO that, at least for now. Long term? If my brain starts to deteriorate to the point I can’t even write, I will likely not be the type to rage against the dying of the light but rather more likely to find a nice hospice in Vermont to end things. That’s the true nuclear option I guess.
For now, I’m in the world of being flexible on my standards and accepting a lower quality outcome than I would like for my website. I don’t really have a choice, but I’ll pretend I’m choosing to accept it.
Today I choose to bend rather than break, and I’ve put my site back to the way it was, even fixing a stupid problem with commenting that I caused on the weekend, thanks to Matt pointing out it wasn’t working. Yay, I fixed a small problem at least!
So my last two posts about choices have been somewhat inter-related. I’m working on a project that I started some 17 years ago. I’m now calling it “A PolyWogg Guide to Music”, just cuz I like naming my projects. And I didn’t want to call it Dave.
The intent is that I will look at the Billboard top 100 list each year, as well as some other songs from the year that maybe didn’t make Billboard’s sales lists, and see what I think “endures” past the year. There are lots of songs I listen to from the 1980s or 90s and think, “How the heck did that chart?”. The song was mildly entertaining, maybe a bit of a riff that was catchy, but after one year, pffft, it was gone.
And back in about 2003, maybe even somewhat earlier, I started looking at the idea of doing every year. I originally thought, maybe I’d start with around 1980. And I did 1980’s list, made some playlists from it, burned some CDs, and I really liked the result. But the more I messed around with it, the more I started to see “missing” links to earlier music. 1980 was an interesting year to start with, as I saw some songs from the tail-end of the disco era, some others starting into the big hair phase, early sounds of what would become things like Miami Vice themes, etc.
At the time, I was just doing it to see if maybe there was a good way to do up killer playlists for myself. Then, as I started to see trends crossing years, the analyst side of me kicked in. Later, I was listening to a couple songs from about 1955, the early days of rock and roll, and a couple of songs were almost post-40s swing, a bit of R&B, and pre-rock.
It’s kind of a thing with me, casting my eyes backward on what came before. I would love to review all the Best Picture Oscar winners, so I started with 1927 and Wings. I want to review some award-winning mysteries, so I start with the first year of the Edgars. For a current project I am doing on astronomy, I’m starting with the first issues of Sky and Telescope from 1941.
For my review of music, the first year for which I have a reliable set of lists of top songs is really 1943. And while there are lists for R&B, soul, country, classical, jazz, etc., I am focusing on the pop and rock charts (often together). But that wasn’t what my “choice” was about today.
Today, I decided to fix a post. Over the last two days, I’ve made choices about ways to do the formatting and layout, or more pointedly, choices about how much time and effort I want to put into getting the formatting and layout right. I wrote the first post 3 or 4 years ago, and reviewed 1943. There were 117 songs in my working list, and I don’t remember how long it took me to go through them. The point isn’t to rush through them, maybe I’ll do 2 songs one day or 20 the next, it is just that I have a list to work from and I can take notes as I go, marking down ratings or even if the song has some sort of audio glitch in the middle and needs to be replaced.
Yet even if I get the formatting right (which I did) and finally decided on a working layout (which I did), the prose was NOT hanging together. The main pieces were fine, but there was something off with the flow. It had always seemed incomplete to me.
You should know something, I guess, about my editing style. I edit as I go. I am not a writer that plunges ahead, does a whole draft and then goes back and fixes things, nor do I write to an outline usually. If I am in THIS paragraph, and I start to take it in a slightly different direction than I was thinking 2 or 3 paragraphs back, I might finish the sentence here, and then go back and tweak that other paragraph before going on. I tend to think of it as my “edit” window is the last three paragraphs. They are constantly in pencil, so to speak, and as I go, I will indeed frequently edit something several rows back.
But this was more than that. I felt like I had no consistent flow, no real message, kind of like I was lacking a storyline or narrative. Which seems silly for a non-fiction piece, until I realized what I was really lacking was my normal voice. I had comments here and there, other facts I dropped in, but what was really missing was “me”.
So I stepped back and did what I used to do at work when reviewing speeches for Ministers when the flow seemed off. I basically wrote a reverse outline of what I wanted to say, and the problem was obvious. I had 2 or 3 pieces that were linked, but I had separated them by several paragraphs, so it was jumping around. An easy fix. But once in the weeds, I let my inner editor go crazy. Lots of places in the piece were expressed a little too casually, while others were more formal. I smoothed them out, made them more consistent, made them more “me”.
I spent way too much time on a few headings, trying them in regular text, then in a table format, as a large header, as a small header, as a header with multiple colours, and finally as medium headers with one colour and some italics for the song names. Then when I got to my final comments, I grouped them in order with a common structure and feel to them, so it makes a better sense of what I was trying to convey about my review methodology. All of which was helping “me be me” in the piece.
Why am I fussing? Because generally speaking, if I do this for every year from 1943 to 2020 and beyond, I want the structure right before I start, as well as the general approach to content. I hesitate to raise it to the level of saying that I want to do a “professional job” of it, not the right nuance, more just that I have pretty high standards and I feel like it finally meets them. Am I going to have any amazing insights into music that will revolutionize the industry? Hell no, I know less about music than most 11-year-old piano students. But I have views about what I think endures and adds to the cultural collective and what should probably remain a footnote.
I spent a LOT of time editing one single post. And while it IS 3500 words, my edit:writing ratio was pretty high for this one. I don’t know if it was really worth it, but I’m pretty happy with the result. A PolyWogg Guide to Music: 1943 – Pop is the first of many posts about music, I hope other people like them too.
I am constantly on a search for new blocks to make my workflow more consistent, particularly in areas where I don’t even know I could improve things. So I’ve already reviewed 11 block collections, and this is number 12. Let’s see what I get out of it:
Accordion: Expandable, but doesn’t seem to be collapsible except by clicking another one.
Advanced Spacer: Yep, it’s for controlling space and not much else.
Anchor: Useful instead of coding your own.
Banner: Same as headers in most other collections, very large image with the ability to put text over it AND you can add 6 transition effects when you hover.
Button Group: Not a bad deployment, generating multiple buttons side by side, all individually controlled for text, colours, links.
Circular Progress Bar: Options to change colour and thickness, plus value, but not SHOW the value?
Contact Form: Basics, nothing special.
Countdown: Set future time and date, and countdown by years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds, with some typography but not very sophisticated designs.
Counter: Animated count up to a total.
Custom Post Type: Basic options but threw JSON errors trying to load excerpt.
Google Maps: Enter your key, insert your map.
Heading: Custom heading, not default ones, allows you to do font typography plus colours.
Icon: Simple insertion, a bunch to choose from as defaults, nothing exceptional.
Icon box: Centred, heading, description.
Image Box: Main image, doesn’t seem like it does much at first, but it has a bunch of animations on hover.
Image Hotspot: Adds tooltip so you can click in various places on a larger image.
Image Slider: Decent setup, can even just have 1 image, not a slider in that case.
Image Stack: It seems basic at first, but then you have different layout options with a partial overlap like index cards.
Instagram: Connect an Instagram account.
Mailchimp: Couldn’t try this one, don’t have MC key.
Media and Text Slider: I have no need for it, but I like the way it loads them — tabbed for each “slide”. And lots of tweaks available.
Person: Basic profile box. Heading, subtitle, text and description AND their social links.
Post Carousel: Basic options but threw JSON errors trying to load excerpt.
Post Slider: Basic options but threw JSON errors trying to load excerpt.
Price Box: Few options, nothing special.
Price List: Again, I was hoping this would allow me an easy way to do a long table. It had an option for an image, leaders from name to the price, not bad. But only basic tweaking options.
Progress Bar: Simple horizontal line, set the %, it will show in two colours but can’t vary the width of the line but you can animate the load.
Recent Posts: A selection of options to show a list of your last x number of posts in varying detail, although it throws a JSON error trying to show excerpts.
Section: Lots of options to put in backgrounds.
Social Links: Basic options plus some outlining, nothing special.
Table: Relatively simple but powerful, and you can change table settings or cell settings, merge or split, seems great. But you can’t change the typography. WTH?
Table of Contents: Decent, nothing special, although it does give an ordered list option.
Tabs: Basic options, some tweaks, nothing special.
Template Library: Up until here, it was a rather ho-hum collection but the template library is pretty well done with lots of nicely done options. My favorites include SubHero 4. I feel like I could have used that for a nice Blockquote layout, maybe I just like the background image.
Testimonial: Basic layout.
Timeline Block: Alternating blocks with image, header, description, and minimal styling.
Toggle: Seems identical to the accordion.
Video Popup: Only for externally hosted videos or if you have a direct link to the locally-hosted ones, plus loads in lightbox.
Overall, I’m impressed with the level of tweaking but underwhelmed with the overall consistency between blocks. Some have great options, and really stand out. Others are extremely basic with almost no tweaking. I was hopeful for the table block, and it comes REALLY close, but doesn’t allow typography changes. Although I could wrap it in a larger container that would handle that to set the defaults.
Of the close to 40 blocks, I really like their Template Library, and they have decent options for the Anchor, Button Group, Media and Text Slider (even if I have no use for it), and the Table. Not sure if the collection is worth keeping though, unless I’m going all in on their table. Other than one of the nice templates in their gallery, I already have options to do all the rest.
I’ll keep it around as a potential option in the short-term, not sure about the long-term.
I’ve already reviewed the default blocks in WordPress plus nine other collections, with Stackable winning most head-to-head battles. I’m in the market for something that will do interesting tables without having to generate them from a database, but I’m also always open to new Block collections.
Let’s go through the collection of blocks:
Accordion: it is nice, simple, has a header and colour options, but I already have a good one with Stackable and an even better one with Kadence. Pass.
Alert: I’m impressed, as it is a nice simple box with a spot for a title and a background in one of four main preset styles and colours, although the colours can be altered. I’m tempted to keep it around just because it is a quick way to do a text box with light colours in it.
Author: Like many other profile boxes, nothing special.
Carousel: I have no need for a carousel as I use NextGen Gallery and it isn’t compatible. But in addition, for some reason, the images I inserted didn’t seem to line up properly for the top and bottom.
Click to Tweet: Not bad, prepopulate some text you want people to share, they click, and it will copy to Twitter along with a link to your page. Another I have no need for.
Collage: This is a really cool block, where you can have 4 or 5 pics laid out for you like a photo book, with a bit of overlap. Cool way to do a layout. I can’t think what I would use it for, but it’s different.
Dynamic HR: If you were into HTML, you’d remember HR was the code for a horizontal line. Otherwise you’d have no idea what this was. And it’s pretty bland…dots or a line, coloured, thickness.
Event: Wow, this is terrible. Bad layout, almost no styling, no box around it. You could do better on a typewriter.
Features: Logo / icon, title, text. Nothing special.
Food & Drink: If you were doing a menu, great little block. Section heading, title for the item along with icons for popular, spicy, vegetarian, adjustable sizes and fonts, prices, descriptions.
Form: Defaults for Contact, RSVP or Event, nothing special.
GIF: inserting from GIPHY, already covered with other plugins as standard embed.
GIST: inserting code from GITHUB, just as easily covered by code blocks, although I suppose it would be live update, no use for it.
Hero: Call to action with two buttons, nothing special.
Highlight: Simple line of highlighted text…which you could do in any paragraph block?
Icon: Pretty simple set of icons to choose from, hard to tell, you can’t see them all, change colour and size. Yawn.
Logos & Badges: Quick way to insert images from the media library, but for no special purpose other than perhaps to show them in grayscale? IDK.
Map: Standard insert from Google.
Masonry: Nothing special, and only works with default media library.
Media Card: Decent layout, you can insert video, but limited layout options.
Offset Gallery: Okay, nothing special, just irregular gallery.
Posts: Nothing special.
Post Carousel: Nothing special.
Pricing Table: This is the one that I really hoped would lead somewhere. It made it sound like you could do a sophisticated table. Nope, just pricing boxes.
Row: Actually it’s simple columns.
Services: Same as pricing table but with images.
Shape Divider: Eight choices, not bad, nothing fancy.
Share: Simple sharing icons.
Social profiles: Mirror image of Share for your own profiles.
Stacked gallery: You rarely see this but it is a gallery with all the images one above the other, full width. Or you could just insert them individually and have more control over them.
Wow. So I was mostly interested in the “Pricing Table” which turned out to be simply boxes side by side. The rest are okay, nothing very robust, a tier-2 set of blocks overall. I could use the Alert or the Collage, they’re different, but not enough to warrant leaving the whole collection installed for two blocks I will rarely use.
