Mister Bump UK

Blogging Insights (2 November 2020)

Tanya asks this week:

Can you share some tips and tricks for using the new Gutenberg editor on WordPress ?

Okay, I have a tip. When you want to put a little section-break in a post, there is a block called the “Separator” block. It has the option of an inch-long, centered break, as I did above, or a full-line break, as I will do below.

And it supports different colours, if that floats your boat.

The reason? Why not create a break using underscores? _____

Well, when my reader picks up that construct, it repeats the word “underscore” many times over. Can you imagine a whole line of eighty-odd underscores? Can you imagine how annoying that is?

The effect is that I stop reading the post. All that writing effort, wasted! Can you imagine, people rate their time so cheaply?

This is not simply my little peeve, but an inclusivity thing – it is an appreciation that some people might not use their eyes to take in a post. Do people want to make their posts accessible, or not?

Incidentally, I noticed that when I copied Tanya’s question, she’d made it bold and italic, to make it stand out. She could have just used the “Heading” block instead.

8 comments

  1. Understand your peeves. Here’s my spin. I spent fifty-plus years in “computers” from wire-boards, assembler to the new (BS) state-of-the-current-art. I’m done with IT. I fancy I would like to learn to be a writer, not a tinker-toy “programmer.” Having to get under the hood to futch with HTML or any other software to WRITE chaps my sitter. Look, kids, you fancy you are geniuses, impress me. Make software intelligent, intuitive, a tool, not an adversary or something I spend more time with than actually writing. (See “Formatting Intolerance” in my blog archives.) How about you take a painter, and make her play with pixels to redo the Sistine Chapel? Yeah, a neat study, a quirk, and interesting, but wasting her time and talents. Don’t take away my flexibility. Don’t make me wriggle through arbitrary hoops to make your “programming” easier. If back in the days when 300 baud was high-speed we stopped being creative, we’d still be wiring computers by hand and by damn, you’d still read NEWSPAPERS – no links, no gifs, no audio clips, and no “likes”. Climb down from the soapbox Wilcen, the kid wants it for a derby car…

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    • I disagree. IT is a means to an end, nothing more. You can still write your literature, but it can be as brilliant as you like, if nobody reads it… And surely the reason you publish things at all is so that people will read it? By taking my approach you’d be making what you write potentially reach a larger audience, that’s all.

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      • We’re gonna continue to disagree. Computers are a tool, not an end. They are NOT the art form. Why not cancel school, no need to read, let the audio read things to us? Already the reading public is crippled mentally, rejecting long prose, preferring un- punctuated poetry, and rushing to “the pretty pictures.” Someone’s god help us if we have to read, gasp! to think! Provocative post. Thanks.

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  2. Ah! You put your finger on the problem with blocks though…not everyone knows HTML, nor is willing to learn it in order to ‘hobby’ blog. I’m grateful I got enough exposure that I can fake it if I have to, but I much prefer the tools be gathered together in a tool bar. No messing about with pre-formatted blocks, which may or may not do what I want. Viva le Classic Editor! 😉

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