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One of the things I like most about WordPress is that it makes it easy to add captions to images. The interface makes it seamless. Seen above, a lady who lives in France. -
This new WordPress interface that is based on “blocks” that can contain paragraphs, images, headings, etc., is really growing on me.
I don’t know if or when we’ll get this interface at my day job, but it’ll probably be a long, long time because I think WP 5.0 breaks most of hacky plugins that “real” publishers depend on.
It’s not just the shiny newness, or maybe it is, but this new way of looking at WordPress has stoked my interest in the platform, both the .com service and the self-hosted .org project. That’s a good thing, right?
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The late Ted Greene’s books are a great way to get jazz sounds under your fingers. I remember reading about someone who used them to learn jazz on the trumpet. Also, I am loving that leisure suit. Getting back to playing an instrument after not doing it is hard. I don’t know if all instruments are unforgiving, but the guitar really can be. I played for about an hour today, and this is what I did:
First I worked out of Ted Greene’s “Jazz Guitar: Single Note Soloing – Vol. 1.” At the same time, I’m practicing reading, playing in different positions, playing jazz sounds based on scales and arpeggios, and trying to swing while doing it.
That was most of my time today. After that I read through a couple of tunes from the very small (in height and width) “Real Little Ultimate Jazz Fake Book,” published by Hal Leonard.
I’ve had this fake book for a long, long time. I have all the tunes I want to play marked with sticky notes so I can go from one to the other. The chords seem OK for the most part (usually a gripe with fake books). I like that it includes lyrics. A few days ago, I worked on “Autumn Leaves,” but today I played “A Christmas Song,” even though it’s a week too late. It’s a great tune in any season.
What I’m doing right now is playing them in two octaves. Many tunes in fake books seem to be pitched too low for the guitar. You really need to transpose up an octave to play it “right.” In any case, it’s a good practice to play in a couple octaves. When I’m further along, I can start playing them in different keys. When I really get to “know” a tune, transposing should definitely be part of my routine.
In the recent past, I’ve spent more time with the chords, either trying to play the changes, or adding chords to the melody. But the past few sessions, I’ve just been playing the melodies. I’m trying to get around on the guitar and make some music come out of it.
This Carcassi book is from a huge pile that I “inherited” along with a 1950s Goya classical guitar from my late uncle. It’s a long story. I don’t have all of the books, but I do have a lot of them, and I do have a weakness for old method books. I ended by reading out of the “Carcassi Classical Guitar Method.” Most of my “training” in my distant past was in classical guitar, so playing these kinds of things — and sight-reading them — is second nature. I’m sure I used other Carcassi music when I was learning, but I don’t remember using this particular book. It’s very strong. It takes you through different keys and has a lot of little pieces that bring the techniques together in something that’s musical and even performance-worthy.
Classical pieces — especially those in method books — tend to be extremely “guitaristic,” and that’s a good thing for me right now. I tend to think of jazz music as trying to transcend the guitar (no “cowboy” chords, lots of flat keys, e.g. Bb, Eb, stretching out of position), but music written by the pedagogical classical guitar greats — Matteo Carcassi and Fernando Sor — are not just studies in how to play the guitar but also how to orchestrate for the instrument. I play these studies and think, “That’s what you can do with a guitar, all right.”
That was my hour today. I have a ton of guitar books, and I’m getting ready to start working with a metronome and a recorder and playing with changes.
The first thing I have to do is keep going.
I almost forgot to mention that I’m playing my $200 Yamaha acoustic with .013 Ernie Ball bronze strings. Right now I don’t want to mess with the amp. -
I work on Christmas every year. In return, I get Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve off. Not a bad trade-off for a non-Christian.
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No other site has a direct link to the id of the president of the United States
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tl;dr Now that social media is king, post-WordPress blogging systems don’t want to deal with comments, outsourcing them to services such as Disqus. But blogs are better with comments, and WordPress’ native commenting is worth a look.
Static-site generators have been turning the heads of developers who blog ever since the Ruby-powered Jekyll was first released in 2008, with the fashion turning to the Go-coded Hugo and now a flurry of React-based static-site generators that promise super-fast interfaces and advanced functionality.
But still, WordPress persists. Either provided by Automattic, or self-hosted, WordPress is “heavier” to run than a static site, being more or less “dynamic” depending on the degree of caching that a given site uses. But the “batteries included” nature of the system and the difficulty of adding features to static-site generators makes WordPress a workable and viable alternative for the non-technical as well as the very technical who don’t want to devote large amounts of time to bending a bare-bones framework to their will.
While features and ease of use are big, there is one reason why WordPress remains fiercely popular and uniquely complete. It’s the secret sauce:
Comments
WordPress was born at a time before social media. That means before Twitter and Facebook. Even before MySpace.
Even then, interactivity was king, and blog comments provided that interactivity, the back and forth between writer and readers, and readers and other readers.
What WordPress had then (in the early 2000s), and Movable Type before it, is a native commenting system. The interactivity was baked in.
Since that time, most “serious” users of WordPress have outsourced their comments to services like Disqus or Facebook Comments. New commenting services spring up here and there, but nothing has risen above the noise level and said, “Here is your self-hosted commenting system.”
The rise of Disqus was built on the perception — largely real — that native WordPress comments were a spam magnet, and that a unified account system would encourage readers to comment without needing to start an account for every self-hosted WordPress blog they visited.
Instead many dozen (probably a couple hundred) static site generators — StaticGen keeps track of them — tout the ability to build a blog or website and then deploy it as easy-to-server static HTML. But comments? It’s an afterthought. Actually it’s because comments — and any kind of interactivity — is hard.
Almost all of the static-site developers say, “Just use Disqus.”
Then you have a static site that is wholly yours with comments that are … not.
On WordPress you can mirror your Disqus-generated comments on your local database and presumably leave Disqus at any time with your comments intact.
Not so on the static-site generators. Unless you write some code that does it, you are chained to Disqus unless you want to lose your comments.
It kind of kills the “I’m an island” buzz of generating your entire site from Markdown files on your local drive.
I have only dabbled in static-site generators (mostly Hugo, but also the Perl-coded Chronicle Blog Compiler — one of the few that has a comments solution — and Racket-coded Frog), though for years I have been writing a personal blog that is dynamically generated by Ode, which uses Perl-CGI to render pages on the server and also allows for Disqus comments.
I didn’t think about returning to WordPress and embracing the system’s native comments until I saw the blogs written by Penelope Trunk. She’s been doing this on WordPress for a long time, uses native comments, and seems to be able to keep it free of spam. Like the days when my Daily News-hosted tech blog drew many comments — most only there to tell me how wrong I was about a given topic, The conversation was more interesting than the entry itself.
Do we want to give that up with the static sites? And do we want all social-style interactivity to take place on services owned by mega-corporations? Remember forums? They’re pretty much gone. Spam and trolls killed them, I guess. Also social media.
I guess you could think of Disqus as your own social services that integrates with your blog and then stick with them, but once you’re that far down the path, you could just as easily roll out a WordPress (dot org, aka self-hosted) site and see how it goes with native comments.
The biggest beef I have with WordPress right now is that migrating, even from one WP site to another, is tough because your images and links don’t tend to make it. WordPress likes to use full-path links in image tags, and if you download your WP site from one server as XML and somehow manage to get all of your multimedia (mostly images, I guess), you upload to a new WP installation and suddenly have broken image tags in every post.
I could start hacking at that XML, search/replacing URLs to images, but should’t the WP migration tools do that for me?
Maybe they do, but they’re sure hiding all of that well.
So now you know the thing I love most about WP (native comments) and the thing I don’t love (migration pain).
And you see that I keep a hand in with WordPress.com, where you can always blog non-commercially for free, though they would prefer you pay them $4 to $25 per month.
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Not sure why I can’t create a post and then have somebody leave a comment.
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I had to register an application, and still Disqus won’t sync comments on another site I’m working on.
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I saw someone else using this blog theme called Resonar, and I immediately switched this blog over to it. It’s the kind of minimalist theme that users of static blog generators seem to really like.
Steven Rosenberg 