Scratch pad thoughts

I’m still trying to figure out a format for “tweet”-like things without titles that I want to publish, but not on Twitter. For now, I’ve kept a draft post going called “Scratch pad” that I decided to use as a base for the week (or whatever).

One of my least favorite things about the new WordPress editor is the attempt to auto-embed any link that’s pasted on a line of its own, even if it doesn’t advertise oEmbed support. It makes it strangely annoying with my normal workflow for tracking links as part of future posts.

I finally decided I can work around things by using a Custom HTML block to start the post. This gives me an unformatted window of text that I can then pick from when needed.

How far we’ve come to get away from a simple textarea. 🙂

When format and publish a scratch pad, I’m going to plan on titling it “Scratch pad thoughts for {date}”. I’ll note this is inspired by Tom Woodward’s “Weekly Web Harvest” posts and the “Four short links” format used by Nat Torkington at O’Reilly and Daniel Bachhuber.

I’m sure there are more examples of these round-up / link posts out there and I’d love to hear of them. They’re the best feed reader reading!