website – Page 7 – The PolyBlog

The structural blocks I use in WordPress to organize a page or post

June 2 2020

All of the block collections ((default ones, JetPack, Advanced Gutenberg, Atomic Blocks, Kadence, Qodeblock, Stackable, and Ultimate Addons) come with multiple block options that let you better organize text on the page. There are lists, tables, columns, forms, tabs, accordions, and speciality tools. Let’s get started, as this is a big area.

Lists

For lists, the default block is called simply List. Not much you can do with it — it’s either bullets or numbers, and if it is numbers, all you can do is change the starting value. If it is bullets, you can’t even change the look or feel.

Advanced Gutenberg has its Advanced List. At first, I thought it was going to give me more control over numbered lists, but alas, no. It is about icons — 14 very basic ones, in fact. I can change the colour and sizes, but that’s about it. AG also has one called Advanced Icon, but all it does is let you put in a very large icon as a sort of clip art. The list of choices is huge, but it’s exact use eludes me unless you wrap it next to other text or image blocks. Pass.

Kadence also has an icon-based list, called Icon List. It is quite well done in my view. You can choose the number of items in the list, as per normal, but you can easily reorder them using arrows or delete individual entries afterwards too. More importantly, you can decide how many COLUMNS you want them in. That’s pretty sweet. Of course, you can also adjust the colours and sizing, padding and margins, but when it comes to the icon itself, you have about 1600 choices. That sounds really impressive, but most of them you would never have a use for, so the real value is if they have one that you DO want. If I wanted a computer one, there is none per se, but searching for monitor pulls up two (light outline, dark outline). There are also save icons, CD icons, tablets, and smartphones. You can likely find SOMETHING that will work. Checkmark pulls up about 10 different choices that are viable for me. Nothing exciting, but workable. And I really like the two columns. Kadence also has an option for a single big icon, but I honestly don’t know what the advantage of it would be over coloured clipart in your media library.

Ultimate Addons has a neat option in their Icon List block — you can insert an IMAGE as your icon. It makes it incredibly SMALL, sure, but you can do it. You can also turn list items into links. But their icons are rather rudimentary with about 1200, and things like computers or monitors turn up nothing…many of the icons seem to be company logos (like Amazon or Twitter). Pass.

That leaves me with Stackable as the last one (Icon List). Once again, starting a list in Stackable is like all the others combined. It starts with two columns as its default, a six-item list with nice checkmarks for each icon. In the design options, you quickly see the power of the block — you can have a title row, descriptions, and then the list in multiple columns. I paid for Stackable’s premium collection and there are some absolutely stunning layouts. I have no idea when I would ever want such a list, but it’s nice to know I have that power. But back to the basics.

You can have up to four columns of items, and turn on / off whether you want them evenly spaced or item-dependent for the size of the columns. The icons are it’s limitation — it only has five to choose from (checkmark, plus sign, greater than symbol angling right, an X, and a star. You can have three different flavours of each — by itself, inside a hollow circle, or inside a filled circle. All three are “nice”, but hardly the power of 1200 or 1600 icons, even if you wouldn’t use most of them. The colour is selectable of course, and size can go up to 50 px. You have Stackable’s standard power for its text and typography, spacing between items, background for the block, and all of the options for the advanced spacing / alignment / padding.

But overall? While it gives a lot of power, I’m disappointed there’s no option to add other icons nor is there a possibility of inserting an image as an icon. There are blocks that do that on a larger scale, sure, like the pricing box, but I was expecting more.

And what disappoints me most is that none of the blocks handle the simple option of ordered lists. Would it be so hard to give me one that does letters or numbers in stylized fonts? Or that adds Roman numerals?

For now, I have to keep three blocks — default to handle numbered lists; Kadence to give me 1600 icons; and Stackable for the great formatting options. Sigh.

Tables

I generally like tables because it makes things easier for layout of data and information. Unfortunately, it is not very mobile-friendly. For larger data sets, I have no choice, I use Table Press. It’s the only way to use the information easily. If only I had a really good table block that would make those overhead choices less required (but wouldn’t be searchable, I know). There are basically only two blocks available.

First and foremost is the default Table block, and it has the obvious starting point of asking how many columns and rows. But something weird happens when I click on a table, and I’m not sure where the conflict lies.

Let’s imagine I create a simple two by two table. If I click on cell one, column one, it goes wonky for the first row. It “appears” that there are three cells in the first row because it shifts my first cell into the second column, and the second into the third. Almost like it is giving me a “pop-out” cell to allow me to edit. Similarly, for column 2, when I click on the cell it shows me the second cell out in column 3. Maybe it is designed to do that, maybe it’s a conflict, doesn’t really matter, it’s just annoying. The choices for the table are pretty basic — I can have fixed width ones, add a header section or footer section, and change colours or add/delete rows and columns. Not that I need to be able to do much ELSE with a table, but it’s pretty basic. Oh, I forgot, I can add alternating strips and a caption too. It does NOT, however, seem to let me change the colour of an individual cell as I used to be able to do in Classic Editor.

Advanced Gutenberg is the only collection that includes a table alternative, and it too starts with asking me how many columns or rows. Again, I have choices of striped rows; fixed-width cells; footers; and headers. But I can also have collapsed borders, change the overall width of the table in px, change the colours for an individual cell (text and background), borders on every cell, width of the table, paddings, and margins.

Everything the default can do and way more. There’s really no reason to keep the default Table block if I have the Advanced Table block installed, right? Wrong. Because while I can find any example of a Table block if it is in normal blocks, if there are any still wrapped inside a Classic Paragraph block, those are more like “inline” tables, and my searching doesn’t pick all of them up! Dang it. Plus, just for fun? If WP encounters a block with a table, and I convert all of it to blocks, the default block is, well, the default Table block that it has to convert to. Which makes me realize the same for quotes. I disabled Quote and PullQuote but I can’t, I need those there for WP’s internal defaults to find. Double dang.

Columns

One of the things that Gutenberg allowed was an easy way to do columns on the fly, and without resorting to tables to do it. The default block has five main options:

Two columns equal;
Two columns with left as more of a sidebar;
Two columns with right as a sidebar;
Three equal columns; and,
Three columns, centre is large and the left and right are like sidebars.

If you skip this step, the block defaults to two equal columns and you can modify the number of columns up to six equal ones. Some people do a series of columns to give an almost page-builder field…so three columns, one column, two columns can give you almost a star look to your layout.

But other than that, there isn’t a lot you can do to the columns themselves other than change percentages. However, you can put almost any other block INSIDE them. So, for example, if you had a block that didn’t come with sizing options, you can stick it inside a column, and BAM!, you can control the width. You can also control vertical alignment within a block or change the background of the whole block.

Kadence’s block is oddly called Row Layout, which I guess in many ways it is — a single row of a table with multiple columns. And the initial layout options make the default one look like a Word table compared to an Excel spreadsheet. Kadence has:

Single column (why????)
Two columns (equal or sidebars left and right)
Three columns (equal, sidebars left and right, narrower sidebars left and right, really narrow sidebars left and right, two side bars left, and two sidebars right)
Four columns (equal, 3 sidebars left or 3 right)
Five equal columns
Six equal columns

But if you click on the box, they even add another layout option to the settings on the right — rows stacked above each other! Plus they have a Prebuilt Library with some options like three columns, with staff info boxes in them, or three columns with images in each. Perfect “alignment” already done, and the ability to colour backgrounds, etc. You can play with alignments, colours, percentage widths by dragging boxes, adding background colours/video/sliders to the block, etc. It’s a pretty decent option.

Advanced Gutenberg calls their block Columns Manager, and they start with the same options as Kadence with some extra narrow sidebar options with only two blocks. You can add space between columns, or do some sort of column wrap if you go over a maximum height (appears to be like wrapping in columns in Word). I couldn’t get it to work. I also set a maximum “height” on the block, and while it “sort of” held to it, what that meant was it held the main block to that and let the next block come right up to that limit, but since my block went past that, it just overlapped the text. Umm…I guess that could be useful. Maybe? I dunno. It’s not really doing anything for me.

Atomic Blocks has a columns option called Advanced Columns. You know, the same as three other plugins, cuz that won’t be confusing. It starts off much simpler — you choose the number of columns you want, from 1 to 6. Then once you do that, you get to see the sub-options. Once created, you can adjust number of columns, switch layouts, size of gaps between columns, size of the overall three columns together (an internal width so they don’t have to go all the way from side margin to side margin), make them responsive, adjust margins, padding, colours and even stick a background image on the whole block. Like Kadence, highly functional.

As an aside, as this isn’t entirely the place to do it, AB also includes an option called Layouts. While it handles way more than columns, several of the layouts are with columns, nice backgrounds, pleasing palettes, etc. But when I see these, I feel like most of them are more about pseudo-theme building, and I already have a theme I like. Pass.

Moving on to QodeBlock, it’s the “Advanced Columns” block again. It has decent tools, similar to the rest, but here’s the thing…it handles the editing through stacked blocks. So you don’t “see” it vertically the way the other blocks do, it shows you them in the edit window one above the other. WTH? Pass. (Okay, I just realized they are likely doing that to show you what it will look like on mobile where it would likely stack. Hmm, I guess it’s okay, but I’m still passing.)

Ultimate uses the same naming convention, Advanced Columns, and it has some nice features. For example, it outlines the whole block and the columns in the edit window with dotted lines so you can SEE your boxes. (Are you listening, Qodeblock?) It even has options to reverse the columns on certain devices. You can also change the container (inner) width, colours, borders, shadows, dividers, etc. All decent, functional. And very little “wow” factor. Pass.

As you’ll have seen from previous posts, I’m kind of in love with Stackable. So for each category, I tend to save them to the last option hoping they will blow me away. Right from the start, they don’t disappoint. I am mostly testing the options with three columns, and theirs starts off looking pretty bland. Once you click into the block options, you can adjust from 1-6 blocks (standard), choose some layouts (standard), and then, adjust any column to any percent you want (NOT standard). Do you want a 20-70-10 split? Done. Do you want a 15-70-15 split? Done. Do you want a 40-40-20 split? Also done. Done, done and done. Sweet.

Then they go nuts on layout options. Honestly, I have never even thought of these options, at least not for a website! They have five options — plain (obvious), grid (three columns, two rows = up to six blocks), uneven 1 (the first column is full height, the rest are evenly stacked in columns two and three), uneven 2 (the first column is full height, and some of the rows span columns 2 and 3), and Tiled (the first column is full height and then the other two columns are mixed-width with some spanning two columns, one only one). The options depend on whether you choose one to six “columns” (or rather one to six sub-blocks). If you’ve ever made a photo book online where it asked you if you wanted layout options with 3 or 4 photos, and then showed you various layout options that would fit them all in, this is the look and feel they have for the Stackable block. Lightyears beyond the controls of the other options, which is likely why they called it “Advanced Columns AND GRID“. Once you click into the Style tab, things take the volume dial to 11 instantly. You get more ways to control the widths of the sub-blocks, adjust their heights, change spacings within and between, align them vertically and horizontally, change text colours, add a header/title and description, and of course, as with all Stackable blocks, add background options (image, video, colour, gradients, whatever you want). Holy snicker-doodles. Yeah, I can keep this one and dump the rest. By a country mile.

Before exiting this area, I’ll throw in another Stackable block called Number Box. It isn’t quite a normal box like some of the other testimonial ones, it almost acts like a column or table, so I’m including it here. It allows you to choose a series of side-by-side blocks, and it adds numbers to the top. Think of it like a numbered list but horizontal with a lot more styling. Nobody else has anything quite like it. You’re limited to just 1, 2, 3 and if you want, you can even turn the numbers off (I don’t know why you would use a number box and turn the numbers off, but whatever tickles your fancy. While it seems like a simple variation on the team boxes, and to some extent it is, the styling options that come with it raise it WAY above that simple config. One gives you three bright orange circles; another puts funky mosaic tile shapes around an image of phone; another swaps out numbers and puts in letters (although to be fair, it’s just manually edited). You can change the number text, and if you wanted to, stack them to give a series of steps. Which is why I’m going to keep it around. I have lots of places in my site where I need to show steps in a sequence. But wait, there’s more! You can add a title for the block AND a description too. A fully contained block that lets you create sweet 1-3 column layouts with everything already styled for you with awesome choices, or swap out the backgrounds and colours with your own choices (it has all the Stackable default options for styling and layout). It’s awesome.

Forms

It might seem a little odd to include this option in the list, but it is essentially a tool for defining rows and columns in a set grid to create content structure.

Kadence has its Form button, and it’s pretty basic. By default, it gives you an option for a contact form — name, email, and a message, with a submit button. Regardless of the defaults, it basically is a data capture tool with text fields, email, textareas, telephone and accept or select options. You can change defaults, alter widths, add help boxes, etc. There are settings for the name, email, messages, what happens after you press submit, technical email options, spam and Recaptcha options, field styles, button styles, label styles, and success messages. All pretty basic but decent tools. And most seem irrelevant if you have something like Contact Form 7 installed.

Advanced Gutenberg has one called Contact Form and it does the same thing. It has a few less styling options, but same basic functionality. They also include one for login / registration. Since I don’t allow registration, the purpose would be solely to add a bit more look and feel styling to my normal login screen. Useful for some, nothing to offer me.

Ultimate goes one step further…they offer a styler that works directly with Contact Form 7. This is a GREAT tool, and since I use Contact Form 7, no reason for me to keep the other ones. This lets me adjust my CF7 form for a number of look and feel / style options as well as adding things like radio buttons. If you do enough data fields, you could turn it into almost a survey tool. Nice. I’ll keep it.

Tabs

Under the Classic Editor, I only ever used tabs once on a report page where I had different sections and it seemed the best way to do it. Under the Block Editor, I recently used it for a page for my HR Guide, but just once. It isn’t a tool that I reach for regularly in my toolbox, but when I need it, I need a tool that will do it.

Kadence is the one I used for my HR guide, and the opening to the Tabs block is the reason why — you have different styles of tabs to choose from, one of which is vertical tabs going down the side (which is what I used for my HR Guide). They also come with responsive choices for tablet and phone so that the tabs switch to vertical on smaller devices and potentially even to stacked accordions if it is on a phone. However, unlike the Columns options that limited you to up to six, tabs are relatively unlimited. Equally, each tab can have a totally different content block…images, text, whatever you want. You could, in theory, create a photo gallery using tabs. You can even choose which tab “opens” first when you open the page. And since it is Kadence, they include 1600 icons as possible additions to your tabs and text, even after you style the tabs out the wazoo for colour and text and borders, oh my! There are another 5-8 options I’ll never use, but they’re there.

Advanced Gutenberg has its Advanced Tabs option, and I like the initial look. The tabs are crisp and bright. You can make them vertical or horizontal, adjust colours and text. But way fewer options than the

Accordions

The sister block to “tabs” is an accordion block. Rather than having you “page” between sub-tabs, accordions expand when you click on them. There is no default one, but just about everyone else does one:

Kadence has an “accordion” block with some basic styling and layout options, and gives you a chance to add a title to the overall block, plus lots of basic options for reach “pane”…the only part that stood out as different from standard styling was the option to have panes only open one at a time i.e., if one opened, the others would close, rather than allowing them all open until manually closed;
Advanced Gutenberg uses their normal nomenclature to have Advanced Accordion, with set icons to identify expansion, standard colours and text styling options, etc…nothing “advanced”, pass;
Atomic Blocks calls its block simply “Accordion”, and it is indeed simple. A single block that expands and collapses, with almost no styling. Yawn;
QodeBlocks does almost the same as AB, although it has nicer colours on the Title. Double yawn;

Which leaves me completely underwhelmed. Will Stackable wake me up? Not really. They too only go with a single one, although they have some options to do things based on what the adjacent one does (like close if the other opens). But overall, they’re pretty tame by Stackable standards. They have lots of basic stylings, but even the premium options are non-existent. I’ll keep it around for some features, but I’ll have to keep the Kadence one too.

More / read more / page break

The default “more” block allows you to basically separate an opening excerpt from the rest of the text, so if you are looking at the page on the main blog page for example, you’ll see up to the More take, and not past. Click it and it will expand the page. Except I don’t use custom excerpts and have no use for it.

Stackable has an option that is a lot like accordions. There is some short text, and when you click on the “show more”, it expands the text. Except it doesn’t “expand” so much as completely replace that first text with all new text. So if you had a short sentence, and click on it, you can replace the short version with the full explanation. Some people like to use it for short and long instructions — if you know how to do what it tells you, just go with the short; if you need detailed sub-instructions, click for the longer version of the instruction. Often the first sentence is repeated in the longer text so it LOOKS like an expansion, but it really is two totally different text fields. It’s useful, so I’ll keep it around.

Default also includes a “page break” block. If you think of it a different way, it is kind of like adding tabs to the bottom of a page. Wherever you put a page break block, the visible page will break there, and you will get a view of the subsequent pages to click on. There are some styling issues as to where that block appears (for example, on my default page here, it put them after a bunch of after-post stylings instead of before them. There are no styling options, and I can’t think of where I would use it except perhaps in some sort of long fiction post. Otherwise, I’m more likely to break it into multiple posts, use tabs, or even accordions. I’ll leave it running but I doubt I’ll use it.

And that’s a wrap on structural blocks for styling my pages and posts.

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

New featured images – Writing

April 19 2020

I mentioned in an earlier post (New featured images – Headers, website posts, and computers) that I was upgrading my setup on my website for graphics, and I’ve already covered posts related to astronomy, my website and computers, and governance (governance, international development, civil service, a conference and my HR Guide). For my website posts, I used to frequently use an image of a frog typing:

I decided during this update that I wanted to re-purpose that image to just be about writing, so I found other images for my website/blogging options.

But even with that re-purposing, and saving it for writing, I’m left with a second question. Do I use it for MY writing, i.e., my fiction? Or do it use it when I’m writing about the craft of writing? Or both?

I confess up until recently, a lot of categories related to my writing have tended to blend together. For example, while I have 52 posts that are in the “writing” category, only five of them are ONLY in the writing category; the other 47 are cross-posted with publishing, family, even weight-loss. Which is a bit of a question mark for me…if I decide to write about a topic on my blog, isn’t it ALL writing?

When it comes to family, I have written eulogies for my father and mother, and a wedding speech for my own wedding. Back in university, I did a skit nite for stand-up style comedy, and my weekend update sketch is on my site. Those are quite different from most of my posts, and I would say are samples of my “writing”. They cross-post, sure, but they are not posts — they are stand-alone writing projects. I’m also working on a novel that I started back in November … it clearly is NOT a “post”. So I have filed it with my writing category. And for me, I think that is the main defining criteria. When I’m writing something as a project, even though I’m posting it, it is “writing”. Anything else is, well, not “writing”.

Yet in that category, I also have a bunch of posts about the technical side of writing. Mostly articles I’ve read, or reviews of classes / books about writing. And when I think of those, it is almost like post-writing, near “editing”, or pre-writing, generic techniques. None of those phrases lend themselves to an obvious image. Editing perhaps could have a red pen marking up text, but that’s hard to show in a small graphic. I found an image of an editor sitting on a throne, or a pile of manuscripts, but those are a particular type of tone. I found one of a pencil over a marked up page, but the look wasn’t appealing, and the dimensions were wrong. I considered one of a typewriter (old school), one of a kid writing at a desk (wrong tone, wrong dimensions), and one of a pencil on blue sheet of paper (nice colours, nothing communicative).

After eliminating those, I’m down to three options. The first is a piece of text with a magnifying glass and a pencil hovering above it. It has an “editing” / “technique” vibe to it, I guess, but the image itself doesn’t resonate with me. The second is an orange piece of paper (visually appealing), with a burgundy ballpoint pen to the side. I like it, it’s decent. And the third one is a red square that looks almost like a button. With a red pencil above it writing on a piece of paper within the square. It isn’t as communicative as the orange paper with a pen, but it “pops” as a featured image. Plus I feel like the red signifies “editing” somehow. Either will work, but I’m going with the red one.

There is one other category with a similar bent to it, and for lack of a better term for the category, I labelled it “publishing”. If the writing technique comes first, and my writing comes second, then the business of getting those words into the world comes next. I could try to do something more with sales and bookstores, but that presupposes a stage that is separate from publishing. If I went the ebook world, those are likely more tightly tied together, particularly if my main sales venue were to be Amazon. As with governance, I created my own symbol. A four-quadrant circle and stuck different “avenues” or “models” of publishing in the quadrants.

With the decision to wrap these all together in the “writing” category, I’ve even decided to delete the publishing category all together. In the end, it comes down to “writing technique”, “my writing”, and the “business of writing”.

Another category complete!

New featured images – Headers, website posts, and computers

April 18 2020

In a previous post (New featured images – Astronomy), I mentioned that I’m updating all of my featured images on my website by category. For “computers”, I have just over 100 posts in that category, although that is a bit misleading. I have tended to use it as a bit of a catch-all category.

For example, the main topic in computers is not really about computers at all — it’s about my website. But to be honest, having separate categories about my website (content and mechanics), how I do things and the tools I use (WordPress, plugins, themes), the tools I use at home (desktop apps, graphic editors), and even how I organize myself (photo backups, etc.), didn’t really seem to make a lot of sense to me. It is a VERY wide category, admittedly, but they do seem to lump together. And until recently, I was “forcing” myself to have “one category, one image” for my theming. With this update, I’m giving myself more flexibility.

Yet even though they are lumped, I feel the same as I do with astronomy. I would like to “nuance” the images I use a bit. Plus, I have a MUCH bigger problem. The main graphic I use now for the category is one of a frog typing. It looks like this:

And since my site is PolyWogg.ca, and my nickname is PolyWogg, and polliwogs are baby frogs, I love the idea of a frog using a computer. It is a perfect graphic for me. Except I want to use it for my writing category, not my “computer” category. I have to confess, I like it so much, I have occasionally used it for both. Like THAT’S not confusing to anyone, including me. If it was slightly better resolution and quality, I’d be tempted to make it my overall logo.

Speaking of which, some people suggest that if you are writing about your “website”, you should use your logo or a modified version of your header as your featured image (a bit of a meta thing, intellectually — a blog on your blog about your blog). That would give me a bunch of choices, including my original frog image that is as close as I come to having a real logo, but I view that more as my personal branding logo, not just a website logo.

It isn’t about computers, it’s about me. And so I’m saving that for my truly “personal” posts. Therefore, by process of elimination, I should use a smaller version of my header. If only I could decide on WHICH header I was using!

Possible headers

Over the past 15+ years, I have had approximately ten headers. The first was a modified form of the big frog logo. My friend Liam designed my first website, and he integrated the image into my core splash page and again into my combination header/menu options across the top.

My second and third options were provided by the Weaver theme and sub-themes that I was using. I liked the idea of having a nicely tied-in image (colour-wise) across the top of my site. But neither lasted long. They looked nice, sure, but there was nothing about those images that resonated with me. I played with having my frog again (option 4), except using it as a logo to the left rather than a banner, and it worked for a while.

My fifth option was a picture I took in Gaspesie of a waterfall. I loved the way the water was hitting the ground, and so I went with this image for a short while. I’m proud of the photo, it resonates with me because I took the picture, but it doesn’t really “say” anything. It’s just a cool photo.

My sixth option was a counter-punch to that one. It was taken in southern Nova Scotia, at a B&B we stayed in for a night. I love the reds in the trees, it has water which resonates with me from my youth, and it has bullrushes (oddly, while “bull rushes” is the official name, the Kawartha region seems to have used the term “bowrushes”, which is what I heard growing up), perfectly suitable for me as a frog. What’s not to love? The colours are a bit strong. And again, I was there only once. Does it look okay? Sure. But it’s not like the location means anything to me. We were just passing through. More resonance than the waterfall image, sure, but not enough to make it my header image long-term.

Partly in response to the previous image (notice a trend?), I wanted something that would have more links to me, my site, my “theme”, etc. Most people would just go to Shutterstock, find a suitable photo, or the best photo even, fit it within the site, tweak colours, etc., and BAM! One header image. And I suppose if I was running a commercial site, I’d probably do the same thing. Except it’s not a commercial site. It’s MY site. Everything that goes on the site comes from me. Every post, every page. With the recent exception of two guest blogs from my wife, I have created all 1400 posts. So I want the site to reflect that “personal” touch, and it starts with the header.

So after the previous images using my own photos, I realized I really liked that aspect. A photo that I would take, unique to me, would head the site. I wanted to maintain the PolyWogg motif, something not so dark as the reds in the Nova Scotia picture, maybe more swamplike for the tadpole idea. And suddenly I knew where that existed. Some place with some personal resonance. The Bruce Pit. My family and I go walking there every spring and fall, and I frequently take photos near the pond. I confess that while my main interest in those walks is getting a good photo of a red-winged blackbird (more on that later), I like the pond.

So early one spring, we went for a quick hike. I tried some shots like the Nova Scotia one — farther back, vista / landscape colours — but I wasn’t feeling it. I headed closer to the water. I got up close and personal with some lilypads, and I found some pink water lilies to go with them. I thought about trying to get a shot of an actual frog in the water, but that seemed a step too far in the motif to me. I tried a bunch of shots, different angles, different PoV, different depths, chose a few when I got home, and played a bit with cropping. I’d love to say I hit it fast, and fell in love with a single photo. I didn’t. I found one that worked well, with some cropping, and so I used that for quite a while too. My seventh header.

I had upgraded my camera to a DSLR and was getting better results with my photos, and I took one of a sunset at my inlaws’ cottage on Balsam Lake. Nice, good lake photo, has some merit. A little less “froggy” but I liked it enough to add it to the rotation as my eight header. I tried it for a couple of months, but it didn’t stick.

Then my mother died. That doesn’t sound like something that would trigger a change in my website’s header, but it did, incidentally at least. After her funeral, I went for a drive. Just wanted to be alone. And I drove out to the lake where I grew up. Sure, we lived in Peterborough, but from 24th of May to Thanksgiving, we were always out at Chemong Lake. We had a sweet deal on a low-cost campground site, great location, on the water. It was awesome. And of course, right in front of the trailer was a quiet secluded bay with a swamp at one end. A lot like the Nova Scotia pond pic. With bullfrogs, red-winged blackbirds, bullrushes, water. Yeah, that’s why I like all that stuff. It defined much of who I am as a person. It’s also part of my nickname — I got it from my family (mostly my sister Sharon). Paul – Paulie – PolyWogg, not a stretch.

And so it wasn’t surprising to anyone that I went for a drive and that’s where I ended up. Yet I wasn’t quite ready to go directly there. Instead, I drove over near the Curve Lake reserve. I have never ever driven over there before, but I guess I wanted to see how much of the area I could see from that shore (it’s across the lake from our campground area). And the lake was weirdly calm. Not a ripple. Something you NEVER see during a late afternoon. In 20 years out at the lake, I never saw it that calm except first thing in the morning, or perhaps late at night. But late afternoon? Never. I snapped a photo.

And while I like the photo, and it does mean something to me, let’s be honest. It was never a serious contender for a long-term header. It lasted about a week as my ninth header.

I drove over to the campground area, but of course, I should have mentioned that it is long-gone, replaced by a small sub-division of expensive lake homes. But the coastline doesn’t change. The bay is still there. The swamp is gone, the bay’s been dredged out, but oddly enough, some of the trees are still there. Even a hill that was behind our campsite is still mostly there, I thought they would have flattened that considerably. But near the site is a road’s end boat launch that used to double as our swimming hole. The county used to drop sand there every spring, so you had sand out about 30 feet or so, about 20 feet wide. I spent a significant part of my childhood at that exact spot.

You can’t see the campsite area until you’re in the water, mostly because there is a huge tree on the edge of the property that hangs over the water. It’s still there, getting bigger every year, and it was like seeing an old neighbour to wave “hello” to in the old ‘hood. You can see it over at https://PolyWogg.ca.

Sunset, lake, emotional resonance out the wazoo. Yeah, it was my tenth choice as a header and it lasted for quite some time. I even thought that it might become my “forever” header. But over time, the grief faded, and the resonance lessened a tad. And while I love the image, I feel it is too dark for the site. Not dark emotionally, not sombre, just visually. And so, I have reverted. Back to my seventh header with the lily pads.

Feature image for “the website”

So, after all those discussions of header choices, it is really just context to say, which of those do I use on a smaller scale to represent my “website”. If I whittle them down, there are really only four choices, and the first three fall by the wayside pretty fast:

The tree frog — nope, using that for my “personal” image;
Quiet Chemong Lake (Header 10) — nope, I’ve moved on from that, and it isn’t a great photo for cropping to 150x150px anyway;
My website icon — while this shows in the tab above as the small symbol for a URL page, it doesn’t look that great when you increase the size to 150×150, unless I was going more for Ninja Turtle with someone stepping on their stomach.

No, none of those really work. Which means I’m left with a cropped version of the current header of lily pads and water lilies, with two sub-versions … one is pulled back a bit, one is cropped to the pink water lilies.

While I like the content of the first one with the pads, the pink in the second one is more visually impactful. The second one it is!

Other “computer” images

After that, the rest is relatively straight-forward. Most of the images are new additions, rather than grouping everything under the “frog typing” image… I have added ones for hardware (simple PC), problems (man sad at computer), testing and learning (boy concentrating), smooth sailing (man at ergo desk and computer), and video games (one of the PacMan ghosts, multi-coloured).

And that’s a wrap! I have my new images figured out for the “computers” category. Two categories down, twenty-four more to go. At least a bunch of the other ones are relatively easy.

Finding free images from the internet for my blog

April 16 2020

Many people search on Google and steal any images they find willy-nilly without ever considering the copyright on the original photos. Mostly people who think everything on the net is public domain. But if you’re running a proper blog, and creating your own content, you know that’s not true. But that leaves you with three choices for photos and graphics:

Make your own (on your own desktop or using apps and websites);
Buy it from some pay-per-photo sites; or,
Find free sites.

Lots of sites advertise “free” photos but many are the internet’s version of a drug dealer…they’ll offer you a free sample of a couple of photos or graphics to give you a taste, and once you’re hooked, charge you through the nose for the next batch. And the one after that. And suggest you upgrade to a subscription model which seems incredibly cheap when you’re first setting up your blog when you need dozens of photos, but if you don’t use tons of photos in your site later, it’s a bit of a cash cow for them.

However, earlier this week, someone posted the question on the WP Beginner group on FaceBook, asking where to find images. And the responses poured in rapidly. Some are good, some were silly. Here are the ones I found worthwhile.

I should flag that while many of the other suggested sites had decent photos, many had licenses that were restrictive. For example, many require attribution to say “Image by Jane Photographer”. Which is fair. But if I’m using it for a featured image on my blog, which might be attached to multiple pages or posts, how do you include that? Some people put it in the ALT TEXT, but that isn’t visible and doesn’t meet the requirements of the license. Others just add it to the footer, or create a credits page. All of which are doable, but not something I am ready to add to my updating regime. No, I want free for personal or commercial use (my site isn’t commercial, but some jurisdictions might treat it as such), no attribution required. Often you can find sites that require either attribution or a paid membership, but for a random photo here and there? Not really worth it to me. I already have my own photos as well as extensive clipart collections I’ve bought over the years. If I have to pay again, I can probably find an alternate image.

Photo sites

The most popular one for photos is called Unsplash. I’ve blogged about it before, and at the time, my reaction was:

A site called Unsplash has free images for use, and many of them are even available for commercial use if need be. People, landscape, buildings…lots of choices. One of the things I often “test” when I’m looking at a site is whether or not they have photos of frogs and what kinds. Simple or full-on tree frogs. It’s what I want for PolyWogg from time to time, so it’s a “real” test. Unsplash has a bunch […] which isn’t bad, and while none of them are OMG AWESOME, they’re certainly usable for a blog post if I want something. For those doing an article about a city, you’re likely to find well-known landmarks easily.

That was written a little over a year ago, and so I played with it a bit more today. I’m quite impressed with the sheer volume. And the updated license is pretty unequivocal:

All photos published on Unsplash can be used for free. You can use them for commercial and noncommercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash, although it is appreciated when possible.
https://unsplash.com/license | Unsplash

Another popular suggestion is Pexels.com. It too has an open license, although if you want to use the images on commercial products, you have to modify it somehow (no straight inclusion). However, they also have video options to include, not that I can think of when I would ever want that function. Stock footage, I guess. Pixabay is also popular, and includes a few graphics here and there (* note my revision below). Not many, and the randomness seems almost accidental. Their license is similar to Pexels…if you want to print it on something commercial, you have to adapt it first. Another backup option suggested was Foter. Decent, not inspiring.

Graphics, vectors and clipart

But honestly, outside of some meme creation where I might use photos in the background, my main need for my site is not photos but graphics or clipart (the latest “phrasing” is to call them all “vectors”). For featured images in my blog, I usually prefer graphics, even whimsical ones, to actual photos, so I went looking for good sites.

So I too asked on WP Beginner. Oddly enough, Pixabay came up again as a suggestion. I had noted above that when I searched, there were some graphics with it, but it seemed random/accidental. I really only saw photos. However, when I saw Pixabay come up again as a suggestion but for graphics, I went looking again. Sure enough, there is a “vectors” area. The default search says it will search all of the areas at once, but I didn’t find those options earlier, so I must have somehow had a filter on. I found a really great graphic that might be a better option than another 5 or 6 that I already had as options. Nice!

I also found Public Domain Vectors which has a great collection. Lots of choice, lots of options. Most likely my goto option with Pixabay.

Now I’m ready to rock.

Deciding to play with Blocks as an adult

April 14 2020

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”.