Category: WordPress

The Person Doing the Job Is As Important As the Job

Is It the Tool, Or Is It the User?

It’s as important to use a tool which fits the person doing the job, as it is to use a tool which fits the job.

I started this blog for a number of reasons. One of them is to get more familiar with WordPress in its current form.

And I have found I like the WordPress post editor for editing. I hate the WordPress post editor for composing. It’s not local, it’s hosted on a server somewhere, so sometimes there is a slight delay between me typing and the letters showing up on the screen. At times this is maddening.

More frustrating is trying to navigate between paragraphs using the keyboard. Sometimes the arrow keys work great in the post editor. Sometimes the arrow keys don’t work at all, even when I know there is more text to see if I could just get the screen to keep scrolling down.

I’m By Myself, So If It Works For Me, Then It Works For Me

The last couple of weeks I’ve started composing posts in a program that runs on my computer. No internet connection needed, navigation in the document is simple. Then I cut and paste it into the WordPress post editor and finish editing there.

That works much better for me.

I am sure there are writers out there who love the post editor. And that is the point of this post: sometimes who is doing the job and using the tools is as important, or even more important, than which tools are being used.

This is part of a larger theme I repeatedly see, confusing the How with the Goal and the Why. If my Goal was to learn how to use the WordPress post editor, inside and out, then using a separate program for composing would be admitting defeat. If my Goal instead is learning how to use WordPress efficiently, and it’s more efficient for me to use a separate writing program for composition, I think that’s fine.

What If It’s Not Just Me?

Writing this, I have newfound sympathy for someone supervising a group of creators. Yes, as long as each person gets their part of the job done, then how much do tools matter? But if they have to work together, they’ll need a common framework to talk to each other. If it’s expected that absences can be covered by co-workers, then common tools are essential.

Am I Looking In the Wrong Places?

For tasks such as editing photos or video or graphics, I see many tutorials on how to set up workflow. I don’t see nearly as many tutorials for how to set up workflow when it comes to writing, or to blogging. I’m not sure if I’m actually seeing a lack, or if I’m not looking in the right places.

Strange Comments

I get hardly any comments on this blog. There was one when I first started about seven months ago offering to help me set up WordPress sites.

But occasionally I get comments which appear to be gibberish, or encrypted text. I’m not sure which. The email addresses are always in Outlook. The user name is gibberish. The other user information (besides the email address) is gibberish. The comment itself is gibberish.

It’s very odd.

Technician Tuesday: Stuck in the mud

I’ve gotten the scanner I mentioned last week turned on and set to the correct state. That’s about as far as I got. I’m still working on how to make it display which frequencies it’s scanning, instead of just showing “Scan.” And I’m definitely appreciating why there’s an active market for third-party user manuals and setup services.

Yesterday I wrote about starting with what you have. I have a lot of hardware gadgets. I also have some software programs. I have this blog. I decided to look up RSS feeds to see if they still exist. Yes, they do. And for WordPress sites, if you type “/feed” after the site address, you’ll probably be able to see the site’s RSS feed. It will be in XML format. There are third party readers to turn the RSS feed into something more human readable. But what does that actually do? I’m not sure.

Technician Tuesday: Checking out email lists and opt-in forms (2022 Aug 09)

My previous post was titled Mindset Monday. Tuesdays I am reserving for actual technical information, usually something I’ve learned during the week. Maybe it will help you, the reader. Maybe it won’t.

I write what I’ve learned because it helps me organize my own thoughts. Additionally, it’s a a record of what I’ve learned for future reference. Which is better than trying to keep everything packed in my head. I don’t need to write down every button push or feature. That’s what the manual is for. I write down what works for me.

Today I’m writing about email lists and opt-in forms on a blog (like this one). I’ve gon through a few plug-ins and looked at various options. There are a lot of ways to create forms on a blog. Each of those ways seems to require setting up a separate account on a marketing site or email list site. Furthermore, I will say that user information is something which carries a responsibilities with it. The more information I gather, the more responsibility I’ll have. The more I spread that information around to other sites, the more responsibility I have to keep track of what information I’m gathering and who I’m sharing it with.

Every bit of stuff on the internet requires money at some point. Money pays for the server it’s hosted on. And money pays for the bandwidth to access the information on the server. Also, money pays for the people who maintain the servers, software, databases, and physical communications lines.

Every site and service I add on to whatever I’m using is paid for in some way. That’s true of this blog, my computer, my digital camera, and anything else. I either pay for it with money, or I pay for it with access to my information. (I do know about free open source software, FOSS, and I support people who do that. Even there, services are only free because someone else decided to pay with their own time and effort and money to create something free for the rest of us.) Until I better understand what various sites will be doing with the information I give them, I’ll leave out opt-in lists.

Regarding opt-ins and email lists: gathering user information means the gatherer has to be aware of how they’re keeping and sharing that user information.

I know, if you’re looking for information about how to use technology you probably wanted a quick set-up guide. This blog isn’t for that. The quicker the set-up, the easier the sign-up, the more that’s offered for free, the higher the likelihood there will be a price in time or money or unexpected risk to be paid later. That’s how you wind up with your technology using you, instead of you using your technology.