Michael Boyle's weblog
I don’t read my RSS feeds as much as I used to, and there are a lot of blogs in there that I haven’t actively followed in years – mostly from the very early days of blogging. One such blog is that of Anil Dash – he doesn’t write like he used to either!
However, he published a very good piece at the beginning of October that I think bears some attention: We’re (still) not being alarmist enough about climate change.
I went to a WordPress Meetup tonight to try and catch up with Gutenberg, which is supposedly launching in April. Shannon Smith from the WordPress.com VIP team did a very nice job with the presentation, and kind of set aside some of my concerns. But not entirely.
Gutenberg is the next-gen editor code and (seemingly) baseline technology being baked into WordPress for V5, which is supposed to drop on April 18th. It changes – utterly and entirely – the editing interfaces in WordPress – but also there are plans for this technology to permeate all of WordPress, and be the default editor but also the default interface for plugins and all sorts of other things.
The problem is that there are so many unknowns that it's really hard to get a handle on what this really means. For instance, I make extensive use of tables, and have a plugin (not on this site, on my "production" sites – all 25 of them) to handle this. How will this interact with Gutenberg? Not sure. In theory, I'd create a shortcode block, paste the table's shortcode there and it will just work.
But expecting things to just work is difficult when just two paragraphs up, I found no way, using Gutenberg, to do something basic like formatting the "th" as a superscript! And below this 'graf is an image I would want to align right and wrap around – but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that.
Oh Hai this is OK.
This text is wrapping around the image. I kind of wish it could flow itself around, but who knows maybe this will be OK.
Found a way to do the superscript as well, though it's a slow solution.
One thing I still can't do is check the contents of the text box in Antidote, which is a must-do for every post published. I suppose I could write, switch to text mode and then do it. But I currently write only in plain text, so why would I want to do that?
OK so that worked – to some extent. There was some automatic formatting (curly quotes and the like) that made Antidote puke, so I'd want to (have to) override that.
Columnizing text is kind of interesting, but I'm not sure I could paste it into columns… which sort of defeats the purpose.
Overall, although I'm pretty positive about the potential for this, to be responsible my only approach can be to find ways to protect myself from this. And I have to say, I kind of resent WordPress for basically inventing a whole boatload of work I'm going to have to do just to not break anything…
Rex Murphy’s passionate appeal for Canada to honour Réné Levesque.
Watch:
Look, I’m not sure if “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is one of the greatest terrible songs ever written, or perhaps one of the worst great songs, but one night in 2004 something magical happened as an all-star group was joined by one of the great guitarists in history. As George Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Prince joined the band – and completely demolished Harrison’s signature Beatles song. Love the song or hate it – this performance is truly magical.
It’s now a year since Prince died, and amongst the hosannas is this amazing oral history of the event from The New York Times.
His three-minute guitar solo is a Prince milestone, a chance to see him outside of the purple-tinted (for once, he is dressed in red) context of his own meticulous studio craft. This was Prince the Lead Guitarist — those chops apparent on songs like “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?,” “Electric Chair” and “When Doves Cry” were given free range to roam. And when he tossed his instrument into the air at the very end of the song, it never appeared to land; it was almost as if Mr. Harrison had grabbed it himself
Source: The Day Prince’s Guitar Wept the Loudest – The New York Times
It’s true – the guitar never does come down. Watch:
Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo about the core deceptions at the heart of the administration’s twin crime and immigration policy stances.
We’re familiar with President Trump’s dystopian vision of an America in chaos, preyed on by foreigners and awash in citizens violated by feral criminals and “illegals.” Through last year’s campaign and into this year, Trump has repeatedly lied about the national crime rate, murder rates and much more. Here though is a case where anti-immigrant policies continue to be justified by at least deliberately misleading statements and what can only be called incitement. […]
There’s not much more to say. If this were one deception it might be dismissed. But of course it is not. It is a single illustrative example of deception as policy, one peep in a symphony of lies that President Trump, Attorney General Sessions and all their fellow travelers and appointees use regularly to sell their anti-immigrant crackdown and attempt to return to the ‘tough on crime’ policies of the past.
