Messing around with WordPress and having SO MUCH FUN!
I was recently upgraded while I wasn’t watching (AFK for a while but automatic updates had been left on) to version 6.1 and wouldn’t be all that happy about it except that I’m a WP fan and therefore enthusiastic about whatever they do. Full site editing is the latest thing, and I tangled with that for a whole day or two without any luck, then after banging my head against every wall in sight, discovered a series of useful new-to-me things, both related and un.
I had just installed a WP for my Vicky, promising her that it’s easy and fun and then it turned into everything else but that, because it only takes a few months to suddenly not know what you’re doing any more. Full site editing is too bleeding edge for me, I guess.
But Vicky came up with the FAIRY theme, and it’s every bit as clean and simple as the Basic theme (that’s the name of it) that I had been using before, but more up to date. We’re back to the good old days of crop a banner to these dimensions, pick some colors and then get on with our lives. It took me half an hour to produce a brilliant pink candy cane theme from a random image of flowers from Wiki Commons.
To get the images right I downloaded a bunch of “free, easy” image crop things, but eventually they all failed and I had to revert to ibisPaint. I had been avoiding that because I didn’t know how to use it, but after ten minutes of trying, I started to get it to work and really it’s AMAZING and does so much more, not only cropping to dimensions, but semi-transparent layers, clone brushing, etc. And it works offline! I have a new tool.
Speaking of offline. I’ve been wishing and searching for some way to compose posts offline, other than copying and pasting text and assembling with pictures later. Up at my cold new home there’s just one place on the hill where the phone gets signal, not enough to make calls, but texts go through, and emails if they’re brief enough. I can even load images if they’re small enough. But it’s so cold! I don’t want to stand out there a minute longer than necessary. I’d like to compose a post inside where it’s warm, then go out and hit UPLOAD. I still need to share my fabbdalous nonsense with the world!
The WordPress app does work offline, for composing posts, and queuing images for upload, but cannot, as far as I can see, do both at the same time. Can’t add an image from your device into the post and then upload – “failure: image not loaded”. Also can’t upload images in one session and add them to the post in the next – the Media tab forgets them and no way to insert them because, “failure: not connected”. Hmph.
Bouncing around ideas, I even thought for a while of good old html and an editor. I could leave my WP install right here and share a link to another directory with some basic pages and pictures, then go up to the phone zone, fire up FTP and… argh, there we are, fiddling in the cold with hurting fingers.
Then I found the solution to taht! Posting by email, YAYYY! They mention “journalists in foreign countries” as the ones who may find this feature useful, but it’s also cool in other cold places, like up on my hill where EMFs are only frying your brains, just a little bit, in one spot.
Now I have this FABBDAlous new theme, AND I can throw some content at it from anywhere!
That came from https://imagecolorpicker.com/ analyzing my picture of flowers. One of the light pinks happens to be #fabbda 🙂
UPDATE:
Nov 2023. Found out Fairy is nagware, and “no rage, like love to hatred turned”. Just when I thought the whole theme thing was settled and not on my to-do list any more, Fairy started popping up with the most annoying messages, top and center of the WP dashboard:
“Hey there! We notice you’ve been using Fairy for some time…” and a request for payment. The way it’s phrased reminds me of a security guard posted at the store entrance: “Hey there! I notice you have an item tucked under your arm. Were you going to pay for that?”
I complained on the Fairy theme message board and had a long, frustrating convo with the devs who insist the messages can be got rid of. Sure they can, until next time you sign in.
Anger about that was just the motivation I needed to get me off my lazy butt and do a little bit of reading about FSE, and guess what, I figured it out!
I’m now using Twenty Twenty Three and absolutely love it. Just a bit of work to get over the hump, and now I feel like WordPress is back the way it should have been all along except UNLIMITED power and control. You can make your site look exactly the way you envisioned it, starting from scratch, as easy as drawing a layout on a blank canvas. This is better than CSS alone, better than any super-customizer theme (I’ve tried all of those). You can customize as much or as little as you please. Wah-hoo, I’m so excited about WP 6.2! By the time I write this, 6.4 and it just keeps getting better and better.
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