Terry Finney
A little introspection regarding the blog itself. A couple of faults have been niggling me the last few weeks. The “WordPress Like” button from Jetpack wasn’t working properly so I wasn’t using it. The “Custom CSS” plugin (also from Jetpack) was being messed up somehow – text was offset under the line numbers making editing effectively impossible. I have been using a Child Theme to work around the latter (and probably will continue to do so), but the problem was still annoying me.
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Tag Archives: Wordpress
Distraction Free Writing and Markdown
For most of my recent posts I have been using Windows Live Writer to draft the post and upload it to WordPress. It works okay but I had problems with a few basic WordPress functions (especially embedding). While I seem to keep having such problems with WordPress regardless of how the text is entered (too many annoying little things don’t seem to work as expected) I wanted to see if life would be easier if I took Live Writer out of the mix.
So I have reverted back to editing in a browser. I had previously found this to be too distracting, so I also tried out WordPress’s “distraction free” full screen editor. Coupled with the “full screen” mode in the browser (F11 in Chrome and Firefox) it really gives a minimalist approach which I think I can live with.
I have also disabled the Visual Editor – I only switched to it once during drafting this post and it mangled some html I had entered. So I have now removed the temptation to use it at all (the profile page in the Admin Dashboard is the place to disable it.)
Having done that and gone into full screen mode, most of the handy buttons (apart from those to insert images and links) have gone. Although I’m fairly competent with html I need the easiest way to show a few words in bold, or insert a heading when necessary. This is where Markdown comes in, which is now available through the Jetpack plugin (it just needs to be enabled).
The following are a few examples of Markdown (Hosted on Pastebin because WordPress insists on transforming some of the characters in the links to html entities):
And here are the results:
This is a level 2 heading
This is a level 3 heading
This is some normal text. Here is some text in italic, bold and monospace.
- This is a bullet point (the preceding blank line is needed)
- This is a second bullet point
- This is a numbered list
- This is the second line – the number used doesn’t matter!
This is quoted text
This is a second line of quoted text
Say I want to put something in *asterisks*
This is a simple link: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics
This is another link example with a title.
The Markdown Mark comes from here: https://github.com/dcurtis/markdown-mark
Resources Page
A shorter post this week. I’m working on a Resources Page which has a series of links to sites that I find useful or interesting. The list is mainly an import of the sites I read on Tiny Tiny RSS.
I’m not impressed with the way WordPress manages links, so it comes as no surprise that this feature is now deprecated in new installs. If there was any easy way to categorize batches of links quickly I would have finished by now.
In putting the page together I had to set up a page template and a custom theme (the latter because the Jetpack Custom CSS editor wouldn’t play nice). Now both are done I suppose it will be easier to make my own modifications in future.
According to the Internet, this is a Lifestyle Blog, rather than a Niche Blog. Also according to the Internet (and I’m paraphrasing now), if you want to be read, then you should set up a Niche Blog and not a Lifestyle Blog. This is a tremendous relief. I’d hate to think anyone was actually reading this.
Why Self-Hosted WordPress Should Power Your Social Media Hub – Danny Brown
via dannybrown.me
A test to see how the Posterous bookmarklet works.