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6 posts with tag “WordPress”

The Monetized Web

Nobody loves a paywall, but everybody loves Substack

Increasingly, it feels like paid memberships for web content are not only a viable alternative to surveillance-driven ad revenue, but one that readers are eager to embrace. The success of Substack demonstrates this. This success is often framed as a preference for reading in the inbox rather than on the web, which is some feat considering how much people have come to loathe email in general over the last couple decades.

But I don’t think it’s the inbox per se that people like; it’s that the inbox gives people what the web used to — and no longer does, but could — give them: an ad-free and distraction-free reading experience. Medium was supposed to do this, but has, perhaps predictably, caved and started showing upsell popups and “related content” sidebars all over its article pages to get your money and keep you on the site.

Patreon, like Substack, has seen a lot of success, but for whatever reason isn’t really thought of as a place for longform writing. Its content tends to be audio, video, art, and access to Discord communities.

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How to get Jetpack’s “Writing Prompts” in WordPress

The WordPress Jetpack plugin recently (and experimentally) added “Writing Prompts” like those seen on WordPress.com-hosted sites since…I wanna say 2020?

I’ve been thinking about getting more into “Personal Blogging” elsewhere, and I figured these would be useful in getting words out.

In order to get these prompts on a self-hosted WordPress site, you need to do three things:

  1. Upgrade to JetPack 11.7 or higher
  2. Add the following line of code to your wp-config.php file:
    define( 'JETPACK_EXPERIMENTAL_BLOCKS', true );
  3. Go to “Settings > Writing” in WordPress admin, and check the box labeled “Show a writing prompt when starting a new post.”

I don’t know when this is supposed to become available without Step (2), but at that point it might be a good idea to turn off Experimental Blocks by removing that line.

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How to correctly internationalize WordPress child themes

Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) are important and often overlooked aspects of WordPress development. Themes should give developers and administrators the ability to add translations for users from among the roughly 95% of the world whose first language isn’t English.

There are plenty of articles written about how to provide i18n and l10n for a single theme, but what about child themes? When building a child theme, assuming the parent theme is properly internationalized, developers may want to do any or all of the following:

  1. Provide localizations that aren’t provided by the parent theme, either in different languages or in gaps in existing localizations.
  2. Modify existing localizations in the parent theme, for instance if the developer of the child theme wants to change the wording of some area of the site.
  3. Provide new internationalizations unique to the child theme, using the child theme’s text domain.

Let’s start by looking at a simple example of i18n in a WordPress theme. For the purposes of this article, the parent theme will be called “Parent Theme” with the text domain parenttheme, and the child theme will be called “Child Theme” with the text domain childtheme.

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WordPress 2.7: Automatic Upgrade in Core!

According to WordPress developer Ryan Boren, the most requested WordPress feature is tentatively slated for the as-yet unscheduled 2.7 release.

This already exists in the form of a third-party plugin, which I’ve actually used successfully before on another blog. I’ve always found upgrading manually to be easy and problem-free, though incredibly tedious. Because I don’t use many plugins or alter any core WordPress files, I think automating the process will be a safe option for me, one that I’ll trust more in the hands of the core development team. Still, I’m sure I’ll wait till it’s been thoroughly tested in a couple versions before using it on this site.

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WordPress 2.5 – March 10

Wordpress 2.5 - Write Post

WordPress 2.5 comes out in less than two weeks! I read something about the “Media Uploader” on the development blog, and, curious, I searched for more details, and came across this WordPress 2.5 Beta demo site. The login name is admin and the password is demo.

Aside from the stunning visual overhaul, there are several immediately noticeable vast improvements in some of the features:

  • Customizable thumbnail (and medium) image sizes — this has been requested forever, and WordPress finally listened. Used to be that every image you uploaded was copied and resized to a width of 128 pixels for automated thumbnail creation, which made a potentially cool feature virtually useless. Now they just need to introduce cropping.
  • Better private post protection — keeping posts private is so unintuitive in WordPress 2.3. The post needs to be marked as “Private” using a radio button, but hitting the “Publish” button instead of the “Save” button after editing a private post stupidly disregards that preference. Now privacy is indicated by a checkbox that flips privacy on and off and keeps it that way.
  • Tag management — I guess we all knew this was coming. It seems like the developers were so eager to get tag support out the door that with 2.2 or whatever it was they didn’t mind that you couldn’t edit any of the tags you create when you publish. Tagging a post just threw tags into the dark recesses of the WordPress database, where they became inaccessible except as part of a tag cloud on your site. But now we have an interface to delete, add, and edit them just as we do categories.

WordPress 2.5 - Media Uploader

It’s pretty sweet. The media uploader is particularly awesome. I can’t wait to install it. The designers still assume all their users can’t read fonts smaller than 16pt. I guess they’re trying to ensure they look Web 2.0 enough. And it looks like the Shuttle Project isn’t going anywhere after all.

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Template Feed/Archive URL Structures for Various Blogging Platforms (Updating)

Being still very interested in web feeds, both practically and philosophically, I subscribe to them often. Occasionally I’ll find a site that seems as though it should have a feed, but contains no link to one within a meta declaration or within the body of the site. Still, most content generators generate feeds, regardless of whether their users make the feed URLs public. In cases like this, it’s fun to poke around and see if I can’t guess the correct URL.

The same goes for archives; certain Blogger users, for example, apparently turn archive links off, so all that’s easily visible are the last ten posts or so on the front page. But, of course, as is especially the case with something as prefab as Blogger, the archives are accessible through a very predictable URL schema.

And what about comment feeds? These are even more scarcely linked to, but in many cases do exist.

Here are the ones I know so far. I plan to update this post as I discover more. This is as much for my reference as it is for yours. So, bookmark it, and, y’know, subscribe to the comments. If you know of any other schemata, please comment. And if you’d like to create your own feeds from any site, give Feed43 a shot. It’s a bit tough to learn, but I’ve successfully made several useful feeds with it.

MySpace

  • All blog posts: http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=[friendID]

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