📕 Book Review – WordPress – The Year Without Pants

I’m obviously a fan of WordPress. So are millions of other people. But, long before many of us started to work remotely, WordPress was ahead of the curve. They’ve been remote since their inception. It’s about finding the right people regardless of where they’re located. The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work details how WordPress is able to perform Continuous Integration and release new features on a daily, even hourly basis. This was more than a decade ago, long before Slack and Zoom. Using tools like IRC, Skype, WordPress blogs themselves and the ever faithful email, WordPress as a company was able to work with engineers across the world, not just the US. It’s a compelling narrative of how to break projects down into manageable chunks. How to be concise and clear in your requirements. How spending all day in meetings so you can discuss what’s going to happen in the next meeting is a complete waste […]

The Block Editor in WordPress needs a bit of work

It’s interesting to note the block editor in WordPress is very similar to Notion. However, “Gutenburg” needs a little work and finesse. I like the block idea. It’s a great concept and will serve WordPress well for the future. However, it can be a little awkward, and doesn’t always respond the way I expect. It’s great to mix and match items on the page. This aloows a flexible layout and gives plenty of room to adapt and grow. But, there are definitely issues when editing with a “browser.” Selecting, editing and moving blocks isn’t quite what it should be. Editing links can be an exercise in frustration. Pasting text doesn’t always looks right. It’s a new approach that should mature well. As mentioned, Notion uses the same idea to great effect. Like WordPress, it suffers when you try to edit and adjust the layout. I usually end up deleting the block and starting over. I will say, I don’t want […]

The WordPress.com Desktop App

As I started looking for a blog tool for Mac, I almost immediately came upon the new WordPress.com Desktop App. Now WordPress has made apps before, but to be honest, I didn’t think they were all that great. They were truly bare minimum and when it came to working with images, things went sideways. However, it seems WordPress has gone back to the drawing board and has something pretty neat and usable in their latest desktop app. Unlike other blogging tools that hook into all sorts of services, WordPress is only publishing to WordPress and it has to be a site hooked into their Jetpack service. That shouldn’t be a problem as Jetpack is free and offers a lot of useful tools. But if you don’t have it and a corresponding WordPress.com account, well, it’s not going to work. Once installed, the desktop app will ask you to log in to your WordPress.com account to retrieve a list of blogs […]

Posts by Pico – A quick review of the blog editing tool

I’ve worked with Posts for a little while now, enough to form an opinion of how it works. And overall it’s a pretty nice little program that has a lot of features going for it. With a couple of simple feature fixes, it could rise to the top of the blog editing software pile and hold it’s own against the likes of Blogsy and Poster. Here are several of the features I really like: The thumbnail view of articles is pretty nice. The titles show up in large print like a slew of newspaper headlines. It supports multiple blogs both from WordPress and Blogger. You can edit and post comments from within Posts itself. The editor is very efficient. You can use formatting such as H1, Blockquote or Pre tags. You can insert links, indent, add images, select the publicating date, set the Category and Tags as well as jump into the HTML editor to fine tune the formatting. You […]

Posts by Pico is still Free and you should grab a copy

I got my copy yesterday and this is turning out to be a pretty impressive app. The thumbnail view of the posts is pretty interesting, it makes them seem like newspaper headlines. There are a lot of features like setting a future date on posts, control over image size, responding to comments from within the app, multiple blog support and an HTML editor. I haven’t really put Posts through it’s paces yet, but so far I like what I see. I did write an article for the blog and replied to some comments. I had no problems. Since Posts is free for the time being there is no reason not to download it and check it out. It has some decent features and offers quite a bit of control. I’ll post more of my opinions once I work with it a bit more, but so far I don’t see a reason not to at least download it and give it […]