Category: Tech Head

Gutenberg Editor TESTING

Cover Picture Block

What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…

… like this one, which is right aligned.

The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing about losing things in the process of copying and pasting.

Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.

Using Gutenberg editor  and inserting with copy paste from IAWRITER first from edit and second from the preview.  They were both the same. Editing html beyond what is available e.g. see header 6 below indicates Custom HTML on side label of block.

Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.

SLH: Non-Fiction

The Undoing Project by Lewis, Michael 612.8
The Grid by Bakke, Gretchen 333.793
The Mother Tongue by Bryson, Bill 420
Embroider Your Life by Mornu, Nathalie 746.44
She Sheds by Kotite, Erika 725
Knitless: 50 no-knit, stash-busting yarn projects by McFadden, Laura 764.4
Presence by Cuddy, Amy 158.1
The Origins of Totalitarism by Arendt, Hannah 321.9
The Death of Truth by Kakutani, Michiko 306.2  Purchased
Engineering for Cats by Delaney, Mat WISHLIST
differently wired. by Reber, Deborah On Order (Library)
My Life as a Goddess by Branum, Guy
Killing It by Davis, Camas On Order (Library)

SLH: Fiction

Everything I Don’t Remember by Khemiri, Jonas Hassen
Where the Crawdads Sing by Owens, Delia
The Idiot by Batuman, Elif
Reading with Patrick by Kuo, Michelle
Little Fires Everywhere by Ng, Celeste AUDIO BOOK
Let Me Be Like Water by Perry, S.K On Order (Library)
Cloud Hotel by Hanshaw, Julian On Order (Library)
Three Things About Elsie by Cannon, Joanna
The Yellow Envelope by Dinan, Kim WISHLIST
Nemesis by Reichs, Brendan Young Adult Fiction
Princess Cora and the Crocodile by Schlitz, Laura Amy Youth Fiction
Beast by Spangler, Brie Young Adult Fiction
Merrow by Braxton-Smith, Amanda Young Adult Fiction
Invictus by Graudin, Ryan Young Adult Fiction
Some Writer by Sweet, Melissa Youth Biography

NBH: Fiction

House of the Rising Sun by Burke, James Lee
Envy by Brown, Sandra
And West is West by Childress, Ron
Keep Quiet by Scottoline, Lisa
Sky Blue by Brand, Max
Holy Ghost by Sandford, John On Order or Ckd Out(Library)
The Last Time I Lied by Sager, Riley (LARGE TYPE)
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by Crantz, Lager
Murder on the Left Bank by Black, Cara
The Cabin at the End of the World by Tremblay, Paul
Crimson Lake by Fox, Candice
Force of Nature by Harper, Jane
The Dry by Harper, Jane
The Bay by Harper, Jane
Sharp Objects by Flynn, Gillian
The Grown Up by Flynn, Gillian
Don’t Eat Me by Cotterill, Colin On Order (Library)
The Ruin by McTiernan, Dervla On Order (Library)
The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly by Cotterill, Colin[^1]
Sweet, Little Lies by Frear, Caz
My Sister’s Bones by Ellwood, Nuala
Snowblind, Nightblind, Blackout by Jonasson, Ragnar

NBH: Non-Fiction

American Fire by Hesse, Monica 364.16
No One Tells You This by MacNichols, Glynnis 362.83
Dead Girls by Bolin, Alice On Order (Library)
What Unites Us by Rather, Dan 323.6
Class Clowns: How … Investors Lost Billions … by Knee, Jonathan WISHLIST
The Physics of Wall Street by Weatherall, James Owen WISHLIST

[^1]: Other mysteries by Cotterill, Colin e.g. -[x] I shot the Buddha, The woman who wouldn’t die

The Inserter Tool

INTERESTING

‘Question: How do I delete this block?’ she asked. You should type the quotes if you want. Ignore those in the text? We will see. Notice the last few characters on the last part of this quote is OUT OF ALIGNMENT. 
Answer: “Right click on the block, then click more options and to remove the block.  CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE key version does not remove the text INSIDE the block.”

She noticed 10/2018 punctuation out of alignment and functioning of short cut key to remove block does not remove text inside, where as using the buttons does.

Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.

Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:

  • Text & Headings
  • Images & Videos
  • Galleries
  • Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.
  • Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.
  • And Lists like this one of course 🙂

Visual Editing

A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:

The editor will endeavor to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery. [Does this mean that more than one sentence is in right alignment is an issue?] Something else is wrong with the above quote block. Still testing.

The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.

Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.

You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.

Media Rich

If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:

Accessibility is important — don’t forget image alt attribute

Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.

The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.

Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:

You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:

Code is Poetry

The WordPress community

If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.

Help build Gutenberg

Thanks for testing Gutenberg!

2016-07-27 PHP Testing, 1, 2, 3

<?php echo “<p>Testing my new PHP function.</p>”; ?>

Doesn’t work in attempts to embed in content-area.  I also tried other places, but it ‘broke’ the code of the theme. Changed the theme to twelve for now.

Update on 2016-07-30: I have spent the last two days using Cloud9 to test PHP code and copy proven snipets to twelve successfully. I cannot remember exactly what else I wanted to do, so I am going through the code section of PHP in PHP, MySQL, JavaScript & HTML5 All-in-One For Dummies, which has proved reasonably accurate so far.  I have corrected (library) book in a few notations where print faded.  However, the statement that single quotes are interpreted as literals does not seem to work in Cloud9. Everytime I put in a variable name that matches, even without the preceeding dollar sign, strange things happen.  I may pursue this later, but for now I am happy that I have added this statement to theme twelve successfully:


        <?php
	echo ‘<br /> &copy;’;
	echo date("Y");
	echo ‘Creative Aspects, Inc.’;
        ?>

This produces: Content ©2016 Creative Aspects, Inc.
Note that this was hard to get into Word Press post because the editing took place and converted text to html even using the Text tab, so all HTML symbols were used for less than, greater than, left single quote, right single quote AND ampersand.

Added function to actually get the year from posted/updated. Look at source code of the pages to actually see the function called auto_copyright.

2016-07-24 Amazon FireTVstick is Great

Yesterday, I installed our new FireTVstick in about five minutes and spent the rest of several hours trying to get it to fail while I had TV and three other devices going at the same time. No burbs, hiccups or sags in performance. Granted we did not watch movie(s) for long, but we did play music and it was great to be able to listen on our receiver/speakers. We were also impressed with the resolution quality and the number of free or nearly free channels included with this and Amazon Prime.

We are looking into subscriptions to HBO NOW, Curosity Stream and Hulu, probably. And I will bet it won’t be too long before we are ordering some educational courses on Great Courses Plus. We will likely reduce our cable channels and use the money we save on these subscriptions. I am so tired of the traditional programs.

Our favorite channels, news and most sports are available. I had some concerns about NFL channel, but hey, we have friends and family we can go visit when we missing something and we don’t mind being a day behind sometimes. We don’t have time to watch everything we want and we record things that are really unnecessary anymore. I do not like be locked into watching something OR recording something at a particular time.

P.S. I watched several series last night (on Amazon Video) and they were only 9 minutes long. At first, I thought that it was 9 hours long and thought, who would have made a movie that long. Anyway, if you made a nine hour long movie it would have to be a mini series – right. We might hurt people. Can you imagine sitting in a theater for nine hours? Anyway one of the series was called “SO DARK” (21 minutes) and it was so good! I want more. NOTE: See also “SO PRETTY” first?

2016-06-17 Add Drive to Router

I want to be able to access a hard drive from any device so I can share pictures, music and other files more easily. There are two question I have. First, will the access significantly reduce the network responsiveness? Second, will I be able to change the router password without affecting our internet service? I will experiment with both just to see. If I don’t accomplish the second, then there is little point in doing this since I do not wish to ‘share’ these files with my host provider or the public at large. I will just have put it on one of my ‘cloud’ storage places. [Pay for space?]

So, first, change the password and see how that goes.
Then, plug a drive in with information on it and check the response time. I might use a flash drive first, so you can easily port file ready (mostly music) for the smart TV or blue ray player.

In any case these are my notes from the instructions I found at: Cnet Instructions on how to share an external Hard Drive

How to Share External hard drive over a router:

Check router’s manual to find out if there are any storage limitations
Enter router’s IP address in browser
Put in user and password (if using defaults, change to strong password)
File Sharing under the Administrator settings (Samba)
Enable

On LAN device:
File explorer to the router’s IP address. e.g. \\192.168.1.1
Use router’s credentials to log in
If leaving attached – MAP network drive to maintain the connection in File explorer

I will hopefully update with the results this afternoon.

2016-06-07 Animation Gif Code

I started at google.com this morning and it says:

It’s World Emoji Day!

This is one of the code projects that you can ‘play’ with. Great for kids. I used this: Made With Code Projects Gif

Here’s what I made with the animator project:

Unfortunately, it did not animate at first. What’s wrong? Basically, the width default crops the animation because these gifs are animated by using a series of snapshots or FRAMES. So you should use the SIZE-FULL option when inserting the media. I learned this trick (or bug fix) from this guy, who also recommends taking off the LINK to the media which is also defaulted. Blogging Handbook Uploading Animated Gifs

I also wanted to use my selfie with makeup – to ASSESSORIZE (another project), but uploading background was disabled. Ah, mmh… so try this instead!

Note: All images are put in the post with width and height set at 150 each. Though the images vary in size the displayed size looks the same. This is scaling. When you import the media, you determine the link and the size option. In this case, emoji is thumbnail, animation is full and selfie is medium. Since the others were not animated, it makes no difference. I also changed the

CLASS=alignnone to alignleft, alignright, aligncenter respectively for the images and added “float: right; and margin: 10px;” inside the image tag

to wrap the text around the images. Source: Result of google search: “wrap text around image HTML5”

If you are interested coding or getting your kids involved, be sure to check out the coding projects links at the bottom of the page, for example: MIT’s Scratch Oh, dear, I could play all day.

2016-07-03 Virtually Madeup for July 4th

I tried Makeup Plus to virtually make up this morning and “share” with my friends on my Android tablet. I don’t like makeup and it never likes me. So it is perfectly fun to dress up without really doing anything. Ha! The ad showed red, white and blue on a model’s lips and I thought there would be some wild and silly things to put on. I settled for a couple of stars. Then I used my tablet picture editor to change the picture. I still wanted more! I looked for images of flags and fireworks. I used these to layer in Art Rage and made a virtual me in celebration. Happy Fourth of July!

Art Rage for Android
Makeup Plus

P.S. Does it look like my tongue is sticking out? It isn’t.

2016-06-27 Chrome Most Popular Browser

I have been using Chrome exclusively for years now, but I did not realize that it was (by far) the most popular browser. From a development standpoint, this is good.  I can design to one browser standard.  So when you/we are learning to code, keep this in mind.
Browser Statistics
This is a test of canvas:



Source: Canvas Lesson(s)

Include the statement:

Your browser does not support the HTML5 canvas tag.

NOTE: Use the TEXT tab to cut and paste the script(s) and elements. You will have to preview to see the results. View the page source to find hidden paragraph tags that can prevent scripts from working. Note that the “cdata” tags for embedded scripts will show up (in WordPress).

2016-06-21 Place Holder for PAS Related Posts

Using subdomains redirected with search results which fixes the URLs problem before production link.  What does this mean? If you use the category to select posts and the results have a url (link), the link is not clickable.  Therefore, I discovered a work around by creating a subdomain and redirecting the subdomain with searchable category in the redirect.

That works, but is only a temporary solution.  I have an FTP account.  Now I have to read up more carefully before I attempt to fix this problem by editing the PHP.  See related posts:

2016-06-15 Fix Search Result Links

2016-06-06 Win 10 Refresh USB ISO

Yesterday, we downloaded an ISO file for a “bootable” USB of Win 10 (for recovery) of the HP Pavillion that doesn’t want to boot anymore. We managed to get it up and running (the PC) and I tried to get the USB loaded on my chromebook, but it failed to work. (Error on the download at the last of the 15 minute download.) So I used the machine to download and left on the flag to make it include machine specific requirements.  I had planned to use on other machines, but I have decided that they need one of their own.  It only needs an 8 G USB Flash Drive (64 bit OS), so I can do that. This is the link the to web site:

[What does ISO mean in this context: Image file.]

Everything went well with the prep, which took only about half an hour in total time to create, but we have not tried it on the machine yet.  It can be used to refresh the Win 10 copy, which I suspect on this machine is Win 10 corruption problem because the machine has a boot menu that sometimes comes up and sometimes doesn’t.  We also had some viruses on one of the external hard disk, which have been repaired, but I would not be surprised if the boot error is occuring as a part of the virus attempting to reload itself.  Sometimes the machine sits and says it is “loading the boot menu” which it is obviously NOT doing.  After powering off, the setup CMOS managed to get it loaded.  I hope this is not a hardware issue, but we are on the lookout for a replacement desktop.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO

The machine does not have a CMOS option to boot from USB, so we redid the ISO on a DVD and this works.  It allows the bootup of the operating system from the DVD and you can work normally from there.  Obviously, there may not be a full load, so if the operating system had actually failed, there may be some features not available.  We are satisified that there may be some circumstances where this could prove useful.

P.S. I created a USB bootable for the other Win 10 desktop, but have not tried using it yet.