One Man's Notes

I'm very glad I called a halt when I was on the verge of starting down the Gutenberg path and jumped back into Dave's 1999 blogging tool, the most direct A to B tool I've ever used.

@AlanRalph I suppose I should admit that I never really warmed to WordPress. I spent well over a decade on Movable Type, long after pretty much everyone apart from @gruber and @jsnell had abandoned it, because of that. I spent a couple of years not getting on with WordPress when I finally migrated, before jumping over (happily) to Ghost. I find that it does what Gutenberg set out to do in a more fluid and intuitive way.

@AlanRalph I got very familiar with it - at one point I was in charge of a very large enterprise installation of it, that was serving millions of page impressions a month. As a static publishing system, it scaled easily in the late 2000s in a way that WordPress often struggled with in that era. So I was pretty good at wrangling it into a solid, reliable platform.

WordPress definitely has its faults and ease of use is chief among them but this is why I write everything offline and then post via much easier means externally, e.g. via Drafts if I'm on an Apple device. I have to admit, the WordPress mobile app has improved considerably over the past 18 months (I'd never have considered using it before) at least on Android. Still, I generally try to avoid the WordPress back end when I can.

@colinwalker Same here. I’ve settled on WordPress as the least bad of the alternatives, so long as a person uses something other than the WordPress clients to post. As you say: Drafts for text posts and something else for images. Still figuring out what that something else should be. Possibly Bear. Possibly email.

I may move the whole shebang to micro.blog when my current WP sub expires. But that’s in a year. Plenty of time to decide.

@MitchWagner Depending on what you want your workflow for images to be (and if you’re on iOS), Sunlit may be a good fit, if you haven’t tried it. Whenever I have more than 2-3 images, I find Sunlit more pleasant.

I think Winer is complicating things for himself there for the sake of his complaint—though, like @colinwalker, I’ll not absolve its UI of all fault :-)

@smokey Good tip. I’m looking for something that will let me add multiple images to drafts, for my daily Found Media posts.

@MitchWagner Oh, hmm. Sunlit might not be a great fit there, but this workflow described by @craigmcclellan might be just what you want (Drafts+Shortcuts). [via the wiki]

@colinwalker

Still, I generally try to avoid the WordPress back end when I can.

The great think about WordPress is that there are so many different ways to avoid the backend.

@smokey I’m looking to produce something like this format.

mitchwagner.blog/2019/12/3...

I’ve been using Bear for that but it may be all I use Bear for and it seems like a waste to pay the subscription for that one thing.

@MitchWagner Oh, right; you mentioned you were still using WordPress, so that Drafts+Shortcuts setup won’t work. But there’s a WordPress Shortcuts action, so you could use a Shortcut that employs that to upload (and then hackily get the URL of the uploaded image, since the WP action returns the URL of the media page, not the media) and then a Drafts action like Craig’s that runs the Shortcut and pastes the HTML/Markdown into your Drafts page…. I should figure out how to share that “get the image URL” section of my Shortcut…

@smokey I'm trying out just saving the images as a draft in Wordpress. We'll see how that goes.

The problem I'm looking to solve here is that I share a lot of memes and found images from all over the web. I share them individually on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, but I think they look better on my blog if I just compile them together in a single post and share them all at once.

My blog gets very little traffic or attention from other people. To some extent, my blog is just something I'm doing because I'm stubborn and want to have an outpost on the public web. I get most of my conversation on Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

@MitchWagner

To some extent, my blog is just something I'm doing because I'm stubborn and want to have an outpost on the public web.

👍

@smokey Update: I started wondering to myself why it is exactly that I'm compiling found images into a daily digest, and I couldn't remember, even though I only started doing it 10 days ago. Now I just post immediately using the Wordpress extension. Problem solved!