… or trying to
So here I am, at the beginning of a summer term, thinking that this is the time I will finally make my blog into a useful thing, and this is my first hour of working on it, and … I get stumped.
I don’t actually want to start writing, or posting, or anything. Dang it!
So I try to figure out what’s holding me up, and I ask myself why I want to blog at all? And I find there are three reasons.
- Mostly, and primarily, I want a searchable, accessible, indexable, taggable, categorizable place for stuff I write (or draw) while I am figuring things out, so that I can refer to that stuff later, as I figure out more. Basically, this reason is all about me, and it’s all about things that are in draft form, stuff that is incubating, developing — stuff that is still raw, not really ready for public viewing. But it’s more polished than what I initially write in my notebooks. So I need to figure out how to make it okay for that just-beyond-raw material to be on the blog. Maybe I use drafts, or change the privacy on these posts, or create a private/WiP/journal/draft/incubating type of post/area.
[I don’t even know what to call what I’m trying to do here.]
Or maybe I just need to realize that I’m the only person reading / using this blog, and live with that. I’m documenting this material for futureMe. That’s a perfectly fine reason for blogging. It’s a personal repository.
This post is an example of this reason for blogging. - Somewhat and secondarily, I want a place to put finished polished material that I would like to share easily with others, at any time. This is especially the case for collected information, or great truths, or lessons I like to provide whenever the need arises.
All the material developed for #JREclipse is an example of this reason for blogging. Even after the event, that collection is worth saving and revisiting as a good guide to enjoying the area. It could morph into a local guidebook quite easily. - Finally, blogging is practice using WordPress, which means a shared experience with SC, another aspect of general geekitude I can claim, and an area of personal learning.
unresolved issues:
- at the top, I really wanted something like a subheading, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that. The type of block at the top doesn’t seem to actually be editable/controllable, although the code inspector shows that it’s an <h2> (I wonder how that will render — it rendered correctly.) Changing out of Gutenberg allowed me to add an <h4> as the first part of the post, but I probably could have done that with Gutenberg after I found the different block types. Still doesn’t look the way I intended it to.
- I (think I) put extra space between the list elements, since they each have multiple paragraphs, but those extra spaces seem to get stripped by the theme, because they do appear in the editor. I think that’s something about the box model, or maybe it’s the after attribute? Need to review that part of CSS. Still don’t know how to customize little things like that.
- Illustrations improve posts. Maybe I need something like a workflow diagram? I know I’ve drawn that multiple times.
resolved issues
- in the preview, using the theme twenty-fifteen, the lists above were not indented properly, though it seemed correct here in the editing space. (Is that Gutenberg? I believe it is, and I’m turning that into an option.) hmmmm. Maybe the theme was screwing it up. I think I’ll just preview a different theme to see if that fixes it. YUP! So I changed to the theme twenty-nineteen. The big learning here is remembering how to use the code inspector in the browser to see what’s actually happening. In this theme’s css, there is no entry for the padding-left attribute. In the other one padding-left was set to 0px. The big question that remains is how to actually find the styles.css file that’s being used, and how to edit it in the child theme. But that’s another learning session.
- I really did want a horizontal rule above the unresolved issues label, but I couldn’t figure out how to get that here. Adding a few dashes doesn’t really do the job. But learning about the separator block-type in Gutenberg does!