Category: Notes

I’ve been using WordPress since 2008. During this time it’s been very robust – much more robust than the sites I’ve linked to over the years, very many of which have succumbed to linkrot and vanished.

But one serious problem is the editing interface,  Gutenberg, which places ‘blocks of content’ at the heart of the process. This just isn’t how I think, and the result is a reluctance to go near WordPress and a near fatal drop-off in the frequency of posting.

And I’m not the only one to have been pondering this problem aloud recently, without a conclusive answer.

The ingredients for a post on this site are usually just text, links and a simple image or two, so my needs are more basic than those of most users. But writing directly in the WordPress app feels like a constant battle. I’m not running a content management system here, or trying to scale up a publishing empire, or surprising my customers with a delightful online experience. Sorry, it’s just casual blogging, like in the old days.

So I’m going retro. Either I’ll revert to the old editor, which is an easy option, apparently, or else I’ll try out a few different external editors that connect to the  WordPress.com API. 

This very post is brought to you by blogbrowser. It’s a simple interface made in Dave Winer’s inimitable outlining style, for exactly my use case: write a quick post  then go and do something else. I hate to say it but at this point it’s maybe a little too simple.

Do you, dear reader, have any words of advice on this matter? How do you show your words to the world without succumbing to this particular kind of writer’s block?

Seeing that Google’s management (now called Alphabet) is at serious odds with its employees over working in China on Project Dragonfly, it appears that the Google Dilemma is very far from over. I wrote a short series of posts about the cultural misunderstandings between Google and the Chinese Government, and it’s still going on. To keep its own Individualist culture, and to avoid being co-opted by the Hierarchy of the Government security machine, Google must drop Dragonfly. The difficulty is that the Individualist culture impels Google to look for a profit at any cost, and so it doesn’t appear possible to drop Dragonfly.

Conservatives’ Love of Nostalgia Can Be Used to Promote Liberal Values

http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-00810-001

Conservatives appear to be more receptive to liberal ideas when they are associated with the past. Conversely, though, liberals do not appear receptive to conservative ideas when they are associated with the future.

The abstract concludes :

“A large portion of the political disagreement between conservatives and liberals appears to be disagreement over style, and not content of political issues.”

Citation

Lammers, J., & Baldwin, M. (2018). Past-Focused Temporal Communication Overcomes Conservatives’ Resistance to Liberal Political Ideas. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000121