A regular gathering of thoughts and their friends

I had a dream last night that I was editing this post, so I’m taking that as a sign.

…is a sentence that I wrote weeks ago, so it must not have been much of a sign.

A thing about not pressing publish once is that it just gets harder to press publish again. So, here.

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I installed Rich’s Content Visibility plugin after publishing my last post so that I could keep a few meta-notes private.

Because (I imagine) it’s such a new addition to the repository, the search terms “Content Visibility”, “content-visiblity”, and the full link to the plugin would return pretty much every plugin in the world except for Content Visibility, which was super annoying.

I finally had to login to wordpress.org, favorite the plugin, then go to the Favorites tab on my site’s plugin screen to install and activate it.

It looks like it’s now in 13th place for those search terms now. Hopefully a few more activations puts it closer to the top of the list. You should check it out and activate it! 🙂

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I’ve been annoyed by trying to write in the block editor, so I moved over to Obsidian thinking I would draft stuff there and then move it over here when complete. I don’t think that worked.

My new attempt is to try using Chrome as my browser for writing. It seems like the actual typing experience here is smoother than in Firefox.

Things that feel the strangest in Firefox: how long it takes to create a new paragraph when I hit enter and how a sentence will pause while being written so that auto-save can fire. And of course I’ll never be comfortable writing without being able to select sentences across paragraphs.

It has come a long way though. 🍻

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Stop complaining about WordPressy things, Jeremy.

I’m very happy that WordPress switched to Dart SASS for 5.7.

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Tempting traps; familiar foes.

First. I reformatted my machine over winter break and did not immediately reactivate any of my traffic blocking rules.

Second. There was an election happening and I plunged into the deep waters of refreshing news sites and Twitter for all of November, December, and January.

But. I’ve gotten irritated at this pattern lately as I’ve found myself caught in loops of refreshing Twitter, refreshing other nonsense, and returning.

So. I blocked all Twitter traffic on my machine, along with everything owned by Facebook. I set a 30 minute timer on the Twitter app on my phone. I’ve already caught myself staring at a blank browser tab a couple times wondering why it wasn’t loading. It works!

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Any system designed to make money out of money is designed for those who already have money to make the most.

The house always wins! Even with stonks.

That all said, I appreciate anyone genuinely trying to bring down billionaires.

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That was an update that aged quickly and yet never aged at all.

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I made a really good coffee on Thursday afternoon.

And now I don’t remember what Thursday that was. And now I think it would be fun to have block level modified dates in posts.

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My FitBit stopped syncing with my phone and two different Mac OSs and I got tired of troubleshooting. I now haven’t worn it in over a month, which feels (a) strange because I’ve tracked steps almost every day since January of 2012 and (b) relieving because there’s nothing hanging on my wrist making me feel like I didn’t take enough steps.

I’m of course irritated enough about technology now—a proper grumpy old—that I’m close to giving up on having a “smart” activity tracker in general. I’ll probably get over that, and probably soon, but I’ll remain irritated enough with Fitbit to switch to some other company.

It would be nice to find a 10 year solution. Maybe that should be my guide: If no 10 year solution exists, don’t settle.

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Funny story. I was sitting here wishing I could skip a track in Spotify with my keyboard rather than switching to the app every time and using the mouse. Then I looked at my keyboard and haha, right.

But now what I really want is to map another key to add whatever is currently playing to a predetermined playlist. And of course there’s an Alfred app that will do it, so what I really need to do is learn how to use Alfred for more than math and opening up apps.

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I’ve been a long time admirer of how Tom Woodward shares his work and was always inspired by the stuff VCU did with WordPress— especially Ram Pages, which took off around the same time we were building our WordPress platform at WSU. I was always looking over with that “ugh, I wish we could get that to happen here” feeling.

His goodbye to VCU series is a great example of documenting your work.

Thanks, Tom! 🍻

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48 pages left in Finnegan’s Wake!