Unpleasant Men

This morning I read the whole of the Vulture article about Neil Gaiman. That link’s to an archived copy, because someone said on Facebook that the original has had the references to Scientology removed because of legal threats. And also it’s paywalled.

It’s so depressing that a man who seemed so decent, so generally a positive force in the world, can turn out to have been an abuser all these year. Allegedly, I suppose I must say.

You know, Paul Cornell included Gaiman as a character in one of his Shadow Police stories, The Severed Streets. If I remember the ‘Neil Gaiman’ character was a villain. We took it as fun at the time; but I wonder if Cornell had an inkling that he wasn’t the nice guy he seemed.

In other shitty-men news, Matt Mullenweg has been blowing up most of the good feeling people have about WordPress over the last few months. I’m glad I moved my site off it a few years ago. But now he’s attacked a woman who used to work on WordPress but hasn’t for years. For no very obvious reason, it seems.

Just being shitty.

I’m not at all sure about this new “Gutenberg” editor they’re adding to WordPress. I’ve installed the plugin version to try it out. Gutenberg is a change to the web-based editor in the WordPress dashboard, not a separate app. I typed up my previous post in MarsEdit, as is my wont, and uploaded it. The Gutenberg plugin imported it nicely and displayed everything as you’d expect. But it turned all my Markdown into HTML.

That’s not what I want, and it’s not how most Markdown-processing plugins — notably WordPress’s own Jetpack — handle Markdown. Instead they keep the source document as Markdown and only convert it to HTML when the page is requested. That’s what using a dynamic CMS means, after all.

It appears that you can get Gutenberg to keep the Markdown as it is, if you type it into what they call a Code Block. So I’ll have to hope that [@danielpunkass](https://micro.blog/danielpunkass) updates MarsEdit to send posts to that kind of block once Gutenberg is the default. Assuming the WordPress API lets you do that, of course.

2017 in Bitface Blogging

Well hello. It’s been a while. That daily posting thing didn’t work too well in the latter part of the year, and was particularly weak in the last couple of weeks. Weak weeks.

In fact I posted 261 times in 2017. It’s surprisingly hard to find that kind of thing out from Wordpress itself. I had to dig into the database and run some simple SQL:

select count(*) from devilgate_posts
  where  post_status = 'publish'
  and post_type = 'post'
  and post_date_gmt like '2017%';

261 is 72% of the days of the year, which is not too bad. Certainly the most posts in any year out of the past fifteen(!)

Here’s the monthly breakdown:

Month Posts
Jan 32
Feb 33
Mar 33
Apr 18
May 27
Jun 15
Jul 21
Aug 17
Sep 18
Oct 18
Nov 23
Dec 6

A strong start, tapering off in the middle, with a rally in November and then a complete collapse in December. I suspect the last is from a combination of post-nano slump and the festive season.

If you’re interested, here’s the SQL that got me that table:

select
  date_format(post_date_gmt, '%b') as Month,
  count(*) as Posts
  from devilgate_posts
  where post_status = 'publish'
  and post_type = 'post'
  and post_date_gmt like '2017%'
  group by date_format(post_date_gmt, '%m');

As to this year, we’ll see how it goes. I hope at least to keep the frequency reasonably high. And improve both code and table formatting.

The Microformats 2 WordPress plugin was causing spurious HTML tags to be visible around my name next to these posts. I’ve disabled it for now. But looking at the page to get that link, I’m realising that maybe I don’t actually need it:

For all themes that do not declare support for Microformats 2, this plugin attempts to add Microformats to areas that are accessible through filters and actions.

I think the theme I’m using, Minnow, probably supports microformats already. Though I confess to having only slight understanding of what microformats are for. I added that plugin while moving the site the other day, along with all the #Indieweb plugins.

Misbehaviour Again

I'm sure you all pay great attention to the goings on at this here blog. You'll almost certainly have noticed things going very strange yesterday, with the same post being repeated three or four times, in various forms and ways.

No? Well, in case: what we had is (probably) a glitch caused by a Wordpress plugin. Or maybe not. Maybe it was something else entirely. Really, we’ll have to see what happens when this one posts.

But I’ve turned off some of the sharing features for now. So you might not even see this if you’re used to being notified via Facebook or Twitter.

Actually since that’s where most of the interaction comes from, it would be interesting to know who if anyone is not reading it that way. Is anyone subscribed to the feed? that’s how I still do most of my blog reading.

Strange Blog Behaviour

For some reason WordPress decided to repost the two posts that currently appear immediately below this one. I have no idea why. They have in common that they are both of the “Link” format (“Format” here is a WordPress concept denoting types of post).

The mildly annoying thing is that I haven’t posted here yet this year, and now I seem to have started the year with two reposts. I could, of course, delete them, but then the above paragraph would be wrong.

Anyway, this is the true first post of the year, even if it was triggered by an aberration.

Hello. Happy New Year.

Messing around with the blog

I'm trying out a different theme on here for a while, along with a Wordpress Plugin called QuickPost .

Both the plugin and the theme are supposed to make WordPress be usable a bit like Tumblr. There are a number of flaws, though. The theme (Tumble-Hybrid by Tribe) is perhaps a bit too simple. I’m all for a clean, simple look, but this might have gone too far.

And the plugin doesn’t allow for a preview before posting (as well as not working properly with Flickr, though presumably that will be fixed in due course).

Edit: No, that won’t do at all. One or other of them disabled comments and lost the title (even though “Allow Comments” is ticked, and the title appears, in the main editor.

I suppose the thinking is that, for something quick and dirty you don’t want comments or titles, but I do. Even Tumblr has titles, if not comments.

Edit 2: Well, a bit of CSS hacking sorted that out. But posting photos isn’t working at all as I would expect. That may be to do with the fact that I’ve never really dealt with posting images before, though, rather than the plugin or theme.

WordPress, this blog, and the Google cache

I doubt that anybody noticed, but my last entry has been missing a bit — in fact, missing most of itself — for a week or more. I don’t know how it happened. I did make a minor edit to it a few days after initially posting it, and I can only suppose that either I or WordPress somehow messed something up.

Unfortunately I had already deleted the draft from my PDA where I composed it. Fortunately there is a behemoth in California that looks after the careless blogger. A bit of obscure Google-diving and my post is back.

Thanks, Google. In future I’ll keep everything in text files.