Category: Misc

Conflict

Here’s a poser for you. I notice a lot of people follow a prompt called Blogging Insights, where you answer questions on your blogging habits. So I’m sure there should be some views on this!

I was wondering, what do you do when you come across a blog post you profoundly disagree with?

By that I mean a blog post where somebody expresses an opinion, where you sit and think what a load of BS? Do you say anything? Do you leave a comment, or walk on by? Would you even “like” the post?

I don’t just mean a tiny disagreement on a fine detail. I mean something that goes against your ethos. Thinking of a topical example, maybe one of you is up in arms about police killings in the US, while the other thinks it is a storm in a teacup and is maybe up in arms about the protesters instead?

I can maybe see two extremes here. Maybe you’d behave differently in each? I don’t know, would you?

The first is where you “know” the person, where you’ve had pleasant exchanges with them in the past.

At the other end of the spectrum, maybe somebody you don’t know from Adam. (I don’t necessarily mean looking at random posts in the Reader until we find a post we disagree with!) Trying to think of an example…when I respond to prompts, I try to read other people’s responses. So, maybe the two of you just responded to a common prompt?

And, just to stir it up further, would you behave differently on WordPress to other social media platforms?

Anybody have any views? Just interested.

Reblog: Oh, mercy……

I must admit, I almost pulled my SLS post yesterday, in favour of this one. It was nothing to do with the prompt, but I thought it was appropriate.

I kept it as it was in the end, but this is a blinding song/video, so I’ll share it now. I kinda figure that everybody that I interact with, everybody who reads my posts, everybody whose posts I read, we’re all decent people with decent values, so there is no point talking politics. Anything I could say, you’ve already thought it.

The thing that gets me about the situation over in the US is not this cop – he, and others like him, can hang for all I care, and good riddance. But are we being asked to believe that this guy had never before shown himself to be capable of killing? So it gets me about all the people who’ve turned a blind eye, who’ve let things slide, because this guy was presumably “one of us”.

You’ll know the song. I knew the song, from years ago, but I had never seen the images. Since I thought about re-presenting it for SLS, I did a bit of digging. First off, this song was written directly about the police’s brutality toward somebody – that’s why the lyrics fit so well. It was released in 1971 – fifty years ago! Marvin Gaye and his band were touring Berkerley, Ca, and one of the band members saw the incident. I guess he thought, being a musician, that his best avenue of expression was music, and the result is a collaboration between three band members. Thank heaven that Marvin was one of them.

Even if we don’t actually *do* anything, we’re doing something just by raising awareness of it. Enjoy Suze’s tune.

suziland too or obsolete childhood

Last year one of my favorite songs was re-released..complete with a video.

After the abysmal events of the last few years, I think we all need to hear these words..and see these images again.

Maybe.. just maybe, people will pay attention this time and make some changes.

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The Power of the Community

I wasn’t going to post again today but I just saw this in my reader. It is on the feed WordPress News, a feed belonging to wordpress.org. wordpress.com, the platform we all write on, is driven by wordpress.org. For some reason they have not allowed reblogs. They don’t allow comments, either, which is slightly more understandable.

It is on the subject of #BlackLivesMatter, but it provides links to pages in both Europe and India. The article is definitely worth a read, I think, and it might also be signposting some useful sites.

The Bullshitters

It sounded too good to be true, and in the end, it was. It will all just work magically, WordPress said. I know web technologies and, provided they built their platform properly, it should’ve been do-able. I dared to hope that they had built it properly. In fact, the biggest up-front headache was whether the new name would be breaching copyright, just because it sounds like a Mr. Man, which will be a copyrighted character. But I deliberately spelled it differently, Mister rather than Mr, and I checked the copyright holder’s web site – sure enough, they prohibit the use of their images. So I made sure I used a graphic from a completely different source, which explicitly says that I have permission to use it on my blog.

I had my doubts about moving the site itself, but went for it anyway. How bad could it be?

In fact, I set the new name of the blog, no problem. All the aesthetic things. I’d also got myself a new domain name for the blog, and that bit was easy too. For new posts.

The problem came when I started looking at existing posts – there are 800 of them. My old web site was all over them. That doesn’t matter for now, because the old name still works, but longer term I was thinking of giving up this name, as time went by. It’s only, like, $10/year, but every little helps and it is one less thing I need to maintain.

The actual culprit was where one of my posts linked back to another one of my posts. That link was wired to use the old web site name. It only affected a minority of posts, about 100 of the 800. I decided that I would bite the bullet, and change the links myself.

So, how do you go about replacing one address with another? Well, if you are allowed to install a plugin, I believe it is possible, but my subscription does not allow me to install plugins. In fact, I would need to pay almost 7x more, go onto a business plan, if I wanted to use plugins.

I also read that I could export the blog, make the changes in bulk locally, then re-import the blog. The fear of losing every post flashed before my eyes. So, I decided to see what WordPress could offer me.

In fact, as far as I could tell, there is no user-friendly way of changing one piece of text into another, across the entire blog. Still, 100 is not too big a number, if I pace myself. So, I started looking at how I could change each individual post.

Now, I’ve heard lots of people complain about the Block Editor versus the Classic Editor, but mostly I put this down to people just liking what they are used to, and not wanting to change. But did you ever realise, in the Block Editor, you have no ability to search? And, by implication, to replace? I would have to look through every line, therefore, of these posts, to try and spot the changes required.

So, I fired up the old wp-admin console. I usually find this is not so slick, but way more heavy-duty. wp-admin very easily supplied a list of posts which contained my old address, and allowed me to open each post in the Classic Editor. Even this editor did not seem to contain a search/replace function, but it did at least show me the whole post’s raw HTML code, which I understand. So I was able to use my browser’s search within a page function to make the replacements. It was slow going, but it worked. After each page was fixed, I hit the Update button in the Classic Editor, and started on the next post.

This went well, until my eyes got so tired, I thought I’d save the rest for another day. Before I quit WordPress completely, I went back to the regular console. What did I see in my notifications? Fifty or Sixty notifications from my blog, saying that Post X had linked to Post Y. Clearly whenever I hit Update in the Classic Editor, it fired off all the notifications again.

Okay, I worked through these fifty or sixty spam notifications, but I also flew past some bona-fide notifications. So, if I missed your post or comment last night, I am sorry. Shit happens.

Overnight, I got to thinking, if WordPress spammed me with all those notifications, then it might have done exactly the same to other people, whose blogs I have linked to. In particular, my Song Lyric Sunday, every week, links to the host’s blog. So, they probably got those same 50-60 motifications dumped on them, too. That really isn’t on. I’m sorry, Jim, I will leave all my remaining posts as they are.

CONCLUSION:

There’s a moral here.

  • It you want to change the name of your blog, go for it.
  • If you want to change the web address of you blog, go for it.
BUT:
  • The new web address will only apply for new posts. Any of your old posts will still link to your old address, which means that
  • any time you (or anybody else) linked to one of your posts, that will link to your old address, too. Which leads me to conclude:
  • You are stuck to your old address, for the lifetime of the blog.
  • So, by all means, introduce a new address, but you still need to keep up the rental on the old address, and keep it set up in WordPress, if you want everybody’s links to continue to work.
  • So, you’ll need to keep paying the subscription for the old domain name. At least, technically, there is nothing more to do on top of whatever you already did on WordPress (except to switch the primary domain over).

written mostly to vent steam, but happy that it also satisfies Fandango’s One Word Challenge (FOWC), platform. And for his Three Word Challenge, ffs 🤣 (only joking).