I learned something strange and semi-important and not-obvious.
If on a PC you put a download link to a file (like an epub file) on a web page, both Edge and Chrome will block the user from downloading it directly unless it is an https file.
It’s funny because my domain is already secure and Edge/Chrome show that to be true.
The user can eventually override this to download an http link, but it is not that easy for many users.
In other words, from now on, every download link must start with:
I’ve been fiddling more with WordPress. It’s super easy to create WordPress instances, but a bear trying to integrate the different websites and mixing static HTML with blogs. Also, I have a few WP websites running older themes which are not mobile-friendly, and only in 2023 or so did I start working with mobile-friendly themes. (Yes, I am embarrassed).
I’m pretty good at using Gutenberg and designing functional and easy-to-navigate pages. I’m not so much at making everything pretty (as the home page on my website demonstrates). I’ve gotten more experience using WP’s block editor and block themes, but I haven’t tried anything daring really. For this site I’m using only the default 2023 theme. On this blog it sucks (yes, I’ll admit that!) , but I’ve made it look relatively decent on another site.
Here are some notes I’ve compiled with trying to implement the 2024 theme on another site.
How to add Javascript properly on wordpress sites. The short answer is to download a WP plugin like WP Code which inserts headers and footers. I’m reluctant to add another plugin, but this separates the customizations from the theme files.
I’ve been tinkering with the 2024 theme, and frankly it’s harder to get the design elements just right. With the block editor you can do a lot of sophisticated things just through the interface, but there are so many moving parts that it’s easy to drown in complexity. I get how patterns and parts work; it’s just hard putting them together in the right manner. Fortunately WordPress.org has some killer video tutorials for Content Creation. My goal is to move my static Personville Press site over to wordpress, but the key was removing a lot of the bloggy elements and making it easy to add book pages and related content. Stay tuned.
Update. I seem to be getting the hang of it. Part of the problem is that I didn’t/don’t properly understand what part you need to modify for a template or pattern which you plan to re-use. It can be very complicated — especially for the 2024 and 2025 themes which have a lot of “templates” which you can apply and just change as you wish. Template is used differently in different places. Another problem is that it’s better to create your own template parts for headers and footers, and then put them into the page and post defaults.
Mailing List Woes
For the last few years I’ve been promising/threatening to make an email newsletter. Several things keep getting in the way, and to be honest, it has been a low priority for me.
One thing I admire about substack, wordpress.com and other places is how they have fused the newsletter with the blog. Unfortunately these things aren’t practical for self-hosted wordpress websites. I have an idea about the work involved; I just don’t want to do it.
Authors are strongly encouraged to use mailing lists to maintain contact with readers. Everyone says to do that. But it’s hard to be so devoted to it when email subscribers are minimal. Also, there are email management websites that can handle a lot of the backend for you. But they are a recurring cost, and I usually can’t afford it. As a result, my newsletters tend to be amateurish and prone to the whims of the third party service.
A few years ago I signed up for Mailerlite (because it had been recommended by several places). Setup was somewhat complicated, and verifying the sender’s domain turned out to be very complicated. Eventually I figured everything out. It quickly became obvious that the main clientele of these places were not authors sending out occasional newsletters but Internet marketers trying to sell goods. Mailerlite’s toolset was geared mainly to promotional emails for the purpose of selling stuff. It was overkill for what I wanted to do, but I could manage. Besides they had a free plan that seemed to service my modest needs.
Fast forward 1 or 2 years later. Apparently Mailerlite just erased my marketing campaigns and email signup page due to lack of use. Mailerlite even lost a list of the small number of people who had faithfully signed up for my mailing list. I ahd to begin the process all over again. For perhaps as long as a year, I had a newsletter signup form which didn’t work at all. (Here’s the bad one and here’s the one I just threw together).
So I started again from scratch. It wasn’t that hard, just tedious.
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve done a geek-oriented post. Frankly, I don’t become interested in geek stuff until I encounter a reason to want to care about it. I’ve found two subjects to geek out about: chatbots and open-source animation software. I don’t expect really to become highly conversant in these tools, but I hope that in the next few weeks I can create simple animations.
I don’t know how seriously I’m interested in chatbots, but I am doing research for a story, and also I have been trying some out for the purpose of story creation (Just at the experimental stage, but…).
Author and blogger David Rothman talks about how to install a chatbot for your book. Basically you set up a free AI account (ChatGPT), install a wordpress plugin that connect to an AI engine, set up a third party database service, upload your book as a pdf with your wp plugin, do a lot of preliminary testing and embed the chatbot on your blog.
This chart separates the different functions of conversational AI (Source).
A lot of the introductions are clickbaity rankings of platforms; they seem to cover dev tools and platforms and front end tools more than the actual technology. I don’t see much documentation about how to customize NLP.
Open Source Animation Software (Blender)
I’ve been trying to make a simple 2D animation graphic in my VegasPro editor, and I was encountering all kinds of difficulties. I was going to ask a technical question about it on a subreddit, then had a lightbulb moment. Surely there are better tools to do this that I can just import into VegasPro.
Several free/open source tools exist to do that. After reading this reddit comment, I realize that all roads lead to Blender. Let me repeat that I am not a graphics guy and certainly not a video guy, so even being mildly productive will be a stretch, but I really really need to do some simple things. So begins my journey…
(Update: I looked at a 2d animation tutorial, and it might be overkill for what is essentially an animated sideshow).
Video Production for Bookish People
I’ll be putting together some video shorts for book publicity. Aside from making short animations, I have many of the tools I need, thank goodness.
For video production I’ll be using my OnePlus11 phone. ($500)
For editing I’ll be using Sony Vegas 19, Audacity and Gimp. The Vegas upgrade license cost 200$, but frankly DaVinci Resolve might might a good free alternative.
For simple animation, I’ll be using the free Blender software.
For lavalier microphones I’ll be using 2 Pack Lavalier Microphone USB C ($24)
For phone mount, I’m using the Metal Phone Tripod Mount 3 Cold Shoes & Arca Port.
For flexible tripod for phone, I’ll be using JOBY GorillaPod Compact Tripod Kit with Ballhead for Mirrorless Cameras up to 2.2 lbs. ($30)
For backup audio, I’ll be using my 4 year old Samsung Lite tablet (unreliable and no microphone) and Marantz audiorecorder + Shure Microphone (ancient, but reliable, even though I have to tape the damn memory card door shut)
First, an underlying nasty problem is that my Google Drive Windows app has been crashing. (So if I try to save to it, it throws up an error message). That might aggravate the sluggishness. Fortunately all I need to do is to kill the phantom process and restart the app.
Second, I have changed all my default download locations so that downloads get sent automatically to my Downloads directory. That saves a lot of time especially on Chrome (though it’s inconvenient to have to sort them and move them elsewhere).
Third, in Win Explorer I’ve been drilling down into directories on the left panel — not the right — and that seems to proceed more quickly.
Fourth, I now see that Windows Explorer lets you open in new tabs — showing more than one view in a single instance. It still can be slow, but it’s faster than two instances or doing everything in a single window.
Fifth, I delay the task of moving things from one directory to another so I can do it all in one batch. If I do it after a fresh boot, it is particularly fast.
Sixth, I’ve been searching for a way to extract multiple zip files simultaneously, and I think I’ve found the best solution (good on all platforms): 7 Zip This also appears to save time.
Seventh I’ve noticed that certain websites tax system resources more quickly than others. For some reason it’s worse on Chrome, so I generally divide things among three different browsers. Generally web pages that need constant updating of state have better performance on Edge than Chrome.
Finally I’ve been more inclined to restart Windows if I see things are getting too sluggish.
But every so often (maybe once a month or two) I end up confronting a technical issue which I absolutely must solve, and I cannot find the answer on the web. People say that half of being an IT guy is being able to use search engines to find the information you need. I generally agree, but sometimes the problem is very odd or maybe you don’t know exactly what problem you are seeing or even if you are using the incorrect terminology. Also, search engines are not as helpful for advanced geeks. Almost all the problems you encounter are complex and have an unusual set of circumstances that no forum thread is going to replicate exactly.
Partly the problem is having too many sources of information and being unable to winnow the relevant information. Sometimes postings on user forums are just not relevant. Sometimes you just lack enough information or smarts to understand the answer when it is staring right at you. Yes, I admit it: personal stupidity is often the primary barrier to a solution.
Describing the Problem: A Messy OCR Conversion
Recently I have been using a book scanner (CZUR ET18Pro) which scans the page and then uses the Abby Finereader engine (but NOT the actual software) to handle OCR conversions. It generally works great for books, but not great for scans of journal articles apparently. The scan can be converted into text pretty accurately, but you have two more issues: First, CZUR puts the text content for each page into a separate frame object. Second, some pages (such as pages of a journal) don’t have enough spaces between paragraphs, causing CZUR to insert paragraph marks at the end of EVERY line. (So if a paragraph has 6 different lines, instead of having 1 paragraph mark at the end, it has 6 different paragraph marks).
About the frames problem, I was quickly able to find a solution from the search engines. You could manually remove each frame or you could run a simple VB script to globally remove these frames using (like here or here) .
The second problem — paragraph marks after every line of text is a pretty hard one. I spent days figuring it out. I have two possible solutions: either I manually adjust all the line breaks or I must come up with a way to clean up these OCR documents.
Manually adjusting the line breaks is tedious, but not terribly hard. I just have lots of pages to do; ideally I would have a way to globally clean up these documents with MS Word’s Find and Replace. I’ve certainly used Find and Replace for documentations — even for complex substitutions. But I need to write some find/replaces that won’t cause any further damage and do it in a way that is easy to repeat.
Ultimately I know that I’m going to have to search for a single paragraph mark and replace it with nothing. That is the Big Substitution — and also the potentially most destructive. The trick is protecting the paragraph marks which you want to be there. But how? You should convert these instances to a temporary value which are immune to the Big Substitution — and then after the substitutions are complete, you can convert this temporary value back to a good paragraph mark.
Also, the order is important. If you get the order wrong, you may create extra work.
Microsoft Office offers some powerful functionality for Search/Replace. Indeed Word offers a limited number of preset search parameters. The first question: Do I “enable wildcards” in the search box?
I quickly realized that enabling wildcards offered more options for text processing. It included a lot of syntax for regular expressions. It still is complicated to write your strings to replace, but the big stumbling block is: how do you search for paragraph marks when wildcards are enabled?
Curiously, this is not documented on the MS Word documentation. Here is the magical voodoo answer from this great article:
You may wish to identify a character string by means of a paragraph mark ¶. The normal search string for this would be ^p. ^p does not work in wildcard search strings! It must, however, be used in replace strings, but when searching, you must use the substitute code ^13.
You read that right: When searching, you must use wildcards and use ^13. But when you are trying to reintroduce paragraph marks into the MS Word file, you must not use wildcards and instead use ^p.
Another gotcha I noticed is that if you remove too many paragraph returns, it will corrupt the files. Instead of getting a clean substitution, the MS Word file is totally blank except for a giant mishapen blob of dark lines and dots.
Here is the series of steps I devised.
Correct the obvious scanning errors, most of which will be highlighted. Usually they are hyphenated words which are broken up into two separate lines.
With wildcards turned on, you will need to manually search for optional hyphenation
Goal: remove optional hyphenation
Find: ^-^13
Replace (leave blank)
Manually or Globally? Globally. (this operation works pretty accurately)
Comment: Do this first because it messes up the substitutions later. Warning: this will not uncover some of the hyphenated words which were broken into separate lines.
Remove MS page breaks (some of these were accidentally added). Make sure to uncheck Use Wildcards for this find/replace. If it is easier, you can just copy the wildcard in the Find section.
Goal: remove all page breaks
Find:^m
Replace (leave blank)
Manually or Globally? Globally
Comment: Uncheck Wildcards and choose Page Breaks from the dropdown under “Special”
Remove MS section breaks.
Goal: remove all page breaks/section breaks
Find:^b
Replace (leave blank)
Manually or Globally? Globally
Comment: Comment: Uncheck Wildcards and choose Section Breaks from the dropdown under “Special”
Page through the entire chapter and add an para mark + $sectionbreak$ whenever there should be a thematic section break.
Find all the cases where the beginning of a line start with a capitol I and are actually a new paragraph. (Often they are indented). Replace these instances with $realparagraph$I. You want to do a search/replace, but manually select REPLACE only for these cases. In many cases, when the capital I is only coincidentally at the start of a line, you will hit the FIND button to proceed to the next instance. You substitute these instances with $realparagraph$I Yes, that is an actual capital I after the $ sign
Goal: find/replace all new para + I
Wildcard? Not selected.
Find:^13I
Replace$realparagraph$I
Manually or Globally? Manually
Comment:
Now search for every time a para mark is followed by a capital letter. Note that the capital I is not included in this range of values
Goal: search for all new line paragraphs except capital Is
Find: (^13)([ABCDEFGHJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZ"“])
Replace:$realparagraph$ \2
Manually or globally? Globally. It still will correct some things wrongly, but you can fix these.
Comment: Find has grouped the two terms with parentheses which allow you to reference them in the Replace statement (Note the \2 with the space before the backslash. I included a regular quote and beginning smart quote in the Find statement, but I think only one of them actually worked in my document. There are a number of false positives, so I recommend doing this manually.
Now for the Big Substitution. Eliminate all single instance of a paragraph return at the end of a line
Goal: Eliminate all single instances of a para return
Find:([!^13])^13([!^13])
Replace\1 \2
Manually or Globally? Globally (but Have that Ctl-Z ready!)
Comment: This searches for three elements where the middle element is a paragraph return, but the preceding or succeeding element is NOT a paragraph return. (The ! means “not”; the parenthesis will group things into element 1 and element 2 which are referenced in the replace statement. This step is very tricky. The Find statement prevents MS word from removing every paragraph return — just the ones at the end of the line. I can’t understand why the Find statement requirements 3 (instead of 2) elements, but somehow it never seems to yield satisfying results.
Now you will reintroduce paragraph marks where they are supposed to be
Goal: Substitute the holder $realparagraph$ with an actual paragraph return. You must turn off Wildcards!
Find:$realparagraph$
Replace: ^p
Manually or Globally? Globally
Comment:
Now you will add extra spaces (in the form of paragraph returns around the section breaks.
Goal: Add extra space around section breaks. You must turn off Wildcards!
Find:$sectionbreak$
Replace: ^p$sectionbreak$^p
Manually or Globally? Globally
Comment: When I have finished cleaning the MS Word version, I actually use a cut-paste operation to import them into Docbook XML using the Author mode of XML Oxygen editor. I will be replacing the $sectionbreak$ into custom html code, so I don’t need to convert them here. I just want it easy to see where the section breaks are.
There you have it. I tested this thoroughly on my test file. Over the next week I’ll do it with different files. Maybe I’ll uncover some anomalies or extra steps, but this is probably enough (I’m guessing).
Regular visitors may have noticed that I have changed my blogging theme. I don’t know; I think this is a temporary thing. I actually did this with no real purpose — aside from stripping the older Thesis theme and the book widgets which I put on the right sidebar. I liked featuring indie ebooks and recommended links and alternative navigation paths, but I had a come-to-Jesus moment 2 years ago when my Google analytics revealed (to my astonishment) that over 50% of my site visitors were viewing it on a mobile device. Here’s what it shows for last year:
Visitor Breakdown, 3/2022 to 2/2023
The sidebar stuff only worked on big screens, and it probably was distracting. The Thesis theme (which I have been been using for more than a decade) has always looked pretty great and serves a mobile-friendly theme. So I can’t really complain about it. But I wanted to update the look a bit — so I jumped right in and installed the default WordPress 2023 theme.
The default theme is minimal indeed, and the front page uses a magazine-style layout of posts (which I don’t like, but I can at least modify it). Also, it messes up my navigation and headings. Apparently this theme lets you modify the block elements using the realtime style editor. That’s good, but has a fairly complex interface in WordPress, so it was always a problem figuring out how (and where) to modify it.
Front-page looks awful — and in fact I don’t even like the thumbnail view. Ideally I would like to create a composite front page consisting of both the latest posts and some static content for navigation. I have always had a fondness for the long front page consisting of 5-10 full posts, but perhaps it’s time to move away from that.
One advantage of the sidebar is that you can create navigation aids; one of my favorites sidebar widget contained my most popular posts. I don’t mind creating manual navigation to call attention aids to certain landing pages. On the other hand, it would be nice to have these elements persist regardless of what web page you landed on.
For about a decade, blogs occupied a privileged place on Google search results (and thus the Internet). Google spidered through them and noticed that they were noncommercial and tended to point to “good links.” Eventually big corporations figured out how to game search engine optimization, and indeed sometimes blogs themselves were gaming SEO with keywords, link farms, etc. At that point blogs started to fade away in search results, and indeed search engines were starting to become mostly useless. Eventually SEO mattered less than popularity on social media and what order in the endless scroll the algorithms of mobile apps are using.
How do people discover web content? Who knows?! Who cares!? But it’s clear that content developers can’t rely on big tech companies to help people learn about their content. Site owners have to do that themselves. Perhaps social media uses algorithms to help people find engaging content, but content creators have no input about that. Better tagging and labeling can do wonders, but ultimately site owners have to hard code enough browsing paths for the user to follow.
Ironically, preparing for my upcoming ebook Non-crappy Things from my Blog will force me to improve the findability of fun blog content no one knows about. Stay tuned for that.
Links
For this month I will be collecting links about WordPress, CSS, typography and Git.
I’ve currently investigating an overall slowdown of my PC. Can’t figure it out. Most of the behavior occurs in Chrome (because that’s where I spend most of my time) and in Windows Explorer. Everything just slows down, and latency issues cause keystroke mistakes to multiply. Some symptoms:
Malwarebytes scans reveal nothing. Nothing is unusual on Task Manager.
I thought Grammarly was interfering with browser behavior — maybe adblock plus. I still haven’t decided. Killing Chrome doesn’t seem to solve the problem (sometimes it improves it).
Edit windows in browsers tend to have the biggest problems.
Hard drive has enough space.
Switching Windows causes the most problems. (I do this often).
A reboot solves the problem completely.
Facebook/Amazon/Google Docs often have the worst problems
I only use Windows Defender for Virus protection. I don’t run Outlook.
No unusual devices.
Also: I have a known video driver issue which sometimes messes up display of videos in full size.
One problem is that I always keep too many damn windows and browser tabs open. I can’t help myself. Sometimes when things get too sluggish, that causes me to open even more damn windows so I have something to look at while waiting for the PC to settle down. Possible culprits:
Crypto-mining
Syncing with Google Drive/Dropbox. Google Drive seems to mess up Windows Explorer often.
Additional observations:
I notice a huge amount of sluggishness on the URL bar in Chrome when Google Search is the default search engine. Restarting the browser often will fix this effect.
WordPress Links
Wow, I swear there are hundreds of articles online about how to choose WordPress themes and practically none that offer useful information. Almost all are clickbait with generic recommendations (“Choose a simple theme” “Don’t choose a bloated theme” and “Make sure it is compatible with your WP Plugins” etc). I want to know what features are available and what features I really want.
WordPress really has a complex ecosystem, and it’s a struggle finding basic information. I will try to include the most useful:
Update 1: Even though there’s a learning curve involved, I think I will stick to the 2023 theme and learn it backwards and forwards. Besides being free, it has some nice defaults and variants — plus it is a good way to learn about its deeper features. The good thing about it is that it’s mostly GUI-based, so I mostly don’t have to mess with CSS and Php. But I want to figure out if it’s easy or possible to use breakpoints for my customizations.
Wow, I’ve been learning a lot of stuff. Here’s my journal of how my learning is proceeding:
4/28 The hardest part is configuring the headings. For the life of me, I can’t figure it out.
4/28. I’m limiting myself to editing the 2023 theme in the style editor (for now anyway). I’ve learned that using LocalWP is a very good way to work on a private test site rather than doing it publicly. (Don’t know how to export my customizations for now.
4/30. It is really hard figuring out where to edit templates. Aha, you have to edit list view on the templates. Aha, the purple things are template parts or reusable blocks. Here is a list of all the theme blocks.
5/2. Breakthrough. I’ve been learning about the Layout features of blocks. I had accidentally turned off Inner blocks use content width. Unless you do that, blocks inside the header, main, and footer templates will be misaligned. Also the dimensions property in the Block Style interface is hard to grok. Basically they hide individual aspects of Dimensions unless you click the + sign (for more Dimensions options). Dimensions are really important when designing a page. Also, I’ve noticed that many block properties have a slider interface where you select 1-5 depending on what you want. At first, this really annoyed me, but I’m warming up to the idea. The key idea is that the WordPress people (or maybe the WP themers) are limiting the customizable properties for layout …and indeed all properties. Sometimes this seems wrong or inconsistent, but it’s also simplifying the design process for geek wannabees like myself.
5/6. Wow, I have really had a hard time with the limitations of the site editor. Particularly with header and footer, it’s hard positioning two elements on a row so that the left element is left justified and the right element (or elements) is right-justified. To solve that, I ended up adding a Row, then adding two columns inside that row and then justifying both columns separately. You can control spacing and margins and font size, but you can’t set max-width=”200 pixels” or something like that. Also, I was playing around with the Media + Text block. It’s hard to edit the height; the key thing (I learned) was inserting the image first and then resizing the image width immediately before adding the text part. (Once the text part is added, you lose the ability to resize the image).
5/8. I’ve become used to using page templates for everything (including for the site home). But if I use pages instead of posts, how do I create archive-type pages to land to? Query Loop Block is your friend. So far I’ve learned that to create your own archive, it’s best to create a basically blank template page (titled “Rj-archive” ) and then when you create a page, 1)choose the RJ-archive template as the template. 2)While adding content to this page, insert a query-loop block.
5/10. It can be hard to figure out where to edit something. So I’ve prepared this list:
Front Page — Use a specific page
Headings/Footers — I would create a separate template part, but then when it’s in good format, I would add it to the default heading part. You can always wipe it clean if worse comes to worse.
Archive of Posts (or Posts by Category) — I would create a page and then customize it by Adding a Query Loop Block.
Archive of Posts by Category. You should NOT select one of the preformatted query loop blocks. Instead you should choose a blank template, and then, unselect the option to use template archive. That allows you to filter by category/date/author.
Author Bio. There’s a block for that. You should add it manually to every post (I think).
5/14. Here’s a useful guide about adding custom html by using the Custom HTML block. Here’s some options about how to add a paypal button to your blog. UPDATE: Turns out I didn’t need to intall a WP-plugin. I just used a button wizard on Paypal and added the code into the Custom HTML block.
5/16. Learning all about SMTP mailers, contact forms, etc. Complicated to set up.
5/25. Setting up a custom Archives of Posts is really really hard.
5/26. Ok, I cheated. Instead of creating a query loop from scratch, I just selected one of the pre-existing outputs from my theme (and then customized that).
To create custom templates, you need to 1.create a custom heading template part with a different name, 2. create a custom template Page and then add the custom heading template part. (Have to wonder — how to set the custom template as a default). Aha, it looks like you should ultimately be importing for customization blocks into the templates named Page and Post rather than creating separate page templates (I think).
There is something called a Style Book — which is hard to reach. I’ve figured out how to find it: Edit Template (or template part) –> At the top bar choose the Yin/Yang Style icon. When you do, a new Style block will appear directly underneath. Click the eyeball icon. That will let you view all the blocks all at once, styled in their unique way.
If you have modified a very important template, how do you restore it to its pristine state? Answer: Go to Manage All Templates (Or Manage All Template Parts), click the 3 dots to reveal a new option: Clear Customizations option.
