in blogging, tech, wordpress

Ok, this is me trying out Gutenberg after it’s full GA release. Let’s see how well it works. This entire post has been written on Gutenberg on Firefox on Windows, saved, privately published, and then edited on Gutenberg on Firefox on Mac, and published publicly. Yay.

Hmmm. There are some interesting quirks. The private publishing thing is available, so potentially there’s scope for the private posts plugin to be updated for Gutenberg. I like this plugin because every post is private by default and that gives me the freedom to publish immediately and edit later.

On a rock, undecided.

There’s an oddity here that might be useful to most people – when you start editing, the menu on the right shifts from Document to Block, so you can quickly change the Block settings if you want. That’s nice and all, but the switch is irritating to me. Maybe in a while I won’t even notice.

Other than that, it’s definitely performing better than it was last time I played with it, when it was in beta. That time, it just completely soured my experience because it kept crapping out on me. But this time, it seems stable and I can actually type a sentence without being constantly kicked out of the editor.

This is a title. Yeah, I know.

LOL. I just noticed that Gutenberg has support for drop capping. I don’t think I’ve ever had it before in my blogs. Interesting!

Is Gutenberg supposed to be useful for longform writing too? I don’t think longformers care about inline images. Also, the whole moving text up or down thing doesn’t make much sense to me. It’s just a weird concept. Maybe it’s useful to speech writers or essay writers – they need to present ideas in coherent ways, with each paragraph a complete idea. So technically, they could massively benefit from being able to move ideas around quickly for the overall coherence and flow of the thing they’re writing.

Wait, does Gutenberg not have autosave? The Classic editor does. It does it every time you stop writing for a significant and noticeable amount of time. But Gutenberg just seems to sit there.

I hit the gear icon and the right side menu disappeared. That’s good. More screen space to focus on writing, even though all the writing is happening within this one central column.

I wonder if Gutenberg would be useful to Instagram poets. Does this allow you to place text anywhere on the page? That might make a very pretty ‘flow’ thing that would work beautifully! If it doesn’t exist, someone should make it!

I really like Unsplash for pictures now. It’s not always on point, but there are some gorgeous pics out there! The Instant Images plugin is also nice – it doesn’t play with Gutenberg, but it sits outside and so it’s easy to add an image and then come to Gutenberg on an already open post and just click on the image block to pull the latest images. That seems to work well. My main problem with the plugin is that it’s got a max image size. They’re just trying to foster consistency, I think. But for an image that’s 5000×4000, to bring it down to 1600×1200 max size is a little irritating. But it does the sizing well actually. No graininess there! (Except maybe the graininess introduced by my theme)

Inline images in Gutenberg aren’t perfect. They don’t do everything as advertised, which will put more pressure on theme devs, I think. For example, the three images in my post till now don’t quite align the way I see them inside the editor. Weird. I wonder how they’ll look if I exit the editor and come back?

Embeds are separately supported now, as a block for each one of them. Nice. Good exposure to functionality. Earlier it used to be – use this shortcut and put the url in there in this format, and then do this incantation to call upon that demon to embed stuff on your blog. Now, it’s just there. Might actually cause an increase in link embedding across WordPresslandia. Maybe. Let’s see. I noticed after publishing that the embed doesn’t look the same inside and outside. Jeez. I think the embeds are a feature of Jetpack and that needs to be further updated to work properly with Gutenberg?

Instagram embedding did not work. Maybe because my blog isn’t https? I dunno. It’s fine.

I wonder if Automattic is tracking Gutenberg installs and usage? They should. It’s pretty good to highlight usage in the first week, first month etc.

edit: When Gutenberg opens in edit view (or maybe this is only on Mac), the currently being edited block is highlighted while others are faded out. That’s nice for focus, but weird for reading and revising

edit to that edit: I realized this is called Spotlight mode. Now, why is Spotlight mode active on my Mac and not on Windows? Don’t tell me there’s small JS differences which the devs have not reconciled yet.

edit: Gutenberg is NOT a happy camper on the Mac. I can move the central edit column horizontally in a not-so-good way. Separately, the dropcap paragraph, when it moves into edit mode, removes the dropcap in a very ugly way.

Verdict: I’m keeping Gutenberg on for a while. A few more posts it in. Let’s see. I already have the Classic Editor installed and I might just go back to that if I don’t see a lot of value in Gutenberg, or if I see a lot of noise in it.

That’s all folks!


What do you think?

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  1. Some thoughts on WordPress 5 and Gutenberg by Nitin Khanna (Nitin Khanna)
    I really like Unsplash for pictures now. It’s not always on point, but there are some gorgeous pics out there! The Instant Images plugin is also nice – it doesn’t play with Gutenberg, but it sits outside and so it’s easy to add an image and then come to Gutenberg on an already open post and just click on the image block to pull the latest images. That seems to work well. My main problem with the plugin is that it’s got a max image size. They’re just trying to foster consistency, I think. But for an image that’s 5000×4000, to bring it down to 1600×1200 max size is a little irritating. But it does the sizing well actually. No graininess there! (Except maybe the graininess introduced by my theme)Why would you want to load a website with a 5000×4000 pixel image? Most people are viewing your website via a mobile browser or a laptop. A 1600 pixel image is more than enough for those screen sizes.
    NOTE: This post was a webmention response. Let’s see if it makes it to Nitin’s website.
    UPDATE: Added a manual webmention. Nothing in the logs from the Webmention plugin.
    UPDATE UPDATE: Found the following in the apache logs.107.170.247.63 – – [14/Dec/2018:15:46:29 -0500] “GET /45538-2/ HTTP/1.1” 200 13726 “https://islandinthenet.com/45538-2/” “WordPress/5.0.1; http://www.nitinkhanna.com; verifying Webmention from 104.236.229.226″ 107.170.247.63 – – [14/Dec/2018:15:46:30 -0500] “GET /45538-2/ HTTP/1.1” 200 13726 “https://islandinthenet.com/45538-2/” “WordPress/5.0.1; http://www.nitinkhanna.com; verifying Webmention from 104.236.229.226″ Like this:Like Loading…Related

  2. Some thoughts on WordPress 5 and Gutenberg by Nitin Khanna (Nitin Khanna)

    edit: Gutenberg is NOT a happy camper on the Mac. I can move the central edit column horizontally in a not-so-good way. Separately, the dropcap paragraph, when it moves into edit mode, removes the dropcap in a very ugly way.

    That’s bad news. But .. maybe not. I dislike Gutenberg.

    NOTE: Another webmention sent via the IndieWeb Webmention plugin. Did it work?

    Like this:

    Like Loading…

    <img alt="" src="https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7fa94585b903e6e183d6164b16b1b573?s=42&r=pg" srcset="">

    <h2><span>Author:</span> KhĂźrt Williams</h2>

    Gen X-er near Princeton University in Montgomery Township, New Jersey, with a passion for aquariums, terrariums, technology, and photography. I love hiking in the woods, and my eclectic musical tastes span soca, Afrobeat, calypso, 1990s rap, grunge rock, and alternative genres. <a href="https://islandinthenet.com/author/khurtwilliams/" rel="author">
    View all posts by KhĂźrt Williams </a>

Webmentions

  • This Article was mentioned on brid-gy.appspot.com

  • With WordPress 5.0 Gutenberg now launched, I think I will wait until the dust settles a little bit. I’m not encouraged by Matt’s State of the Word talk, in which he said ‘get deeper into Javascript’. I’d rather not actually. Most of the few plugins I use haven’t been updated to WP5 yet, and some of its authors write how Gutenberg breaks them. Also there’s still some bugs being ironed out. For now I’ll stick with WP4, until I see more confident reviews. Currently, searches for WP alternatives, calling WP’s new course Dreamweaver, quirks, and bugs, do not inspire that confidence. And already earlier this year there was the discussion of the total lack of accessibility efforts.

  • Micro.blog views on Gutenberg
    @bradenslen If Gutenberg Breaks my Blog Where to Move?
    @nitinkhanna thoughts on WordPress 5 and Gutenberg
    @arush nails accessibility here
    & here
    @ross not “an operating system for the web” but dreamweaver
    @mdhughes sticking to classic Like this:Like Loading…

  • Micro.blog views on Gutenberg
    @bradenslen If Gutenberg Breaks my Blog Where to Move?
    @nitinkhanna thoughts on WordPress 5 and Gutenberg
    @arush nails accessibility here & here
    @ross not “an operating system for the web” but dreamweaver
    @mdhughes sticking to classic Like this:Like Loading…

  • This Article was mentioned on brid-gy.appspot.com