Now that we (or many users) with WordPress.com sites can add plugins, I have taken the opportunity to ‘clean up’ old posts, which means converting them from Classic Editor to Blocks.

If there is a batch way to do them all in one go, I haven’t found it. But I found the ‘Convert to Blocks’ plugin and that has a neat trick, which is that when a Classic Editor post is opened in the Admin panel, it automatically changes the whole post to Blocks. Then all you have to do it ‘save’. That’s it.

Weill that would be a neat trick if I had only a few posts, but I have almost 2,400 posts, going back over nearly twenty years.

Twenty years.

How did that happen?

What happens when you activate the plugin is that you get a new column in the Admin panel of posts. The column entries describe whether a post was made with the Block Editor or Classic Editor. Then you can immediately see which you want to update.

About half of my posts were already styled with the Block Editor and I’ve been slowly looking at old posts and converting them.

Why do I bother? Well it’s because Block themes are capricious in the way they render posts built with the Classic Editor. And I have the time here and there to look and examine and re-read and change posts.

Reading old posts is like reading someone else’s work. And I have junked a few posts that were somehow mistakes. That is, they have a title and a couple of lines and seem to be abbreviated versions of other posts that were complete.

So, that’s that.

But in the course of looking at old posts I found some interesting old photos I made years OK. My normal method of downloading them right from the Admin panel works with some photos but not with others.

The ones it doesn’t work with are in iframes, which makes extracting the information about the images more tricky, and only then can I download them.

In the Admin panel, when I right-click on some images I see this:

So why are some images in iframes?

So far as I can tell, the reason is that WP.com used to use a service named Photon and it would wrap some images to handle scaling.

I wonder whether it is because I tend to use bigger images – meaning bigger pixel dimensions to present them wider on the page?

For example, this image is my typical 1500px wide and at wide spacing in this WordPress theme it renders at 1340px wide.

Meanwhile, in the middle of all the current destruction, at least three tankers in the Hormuz Strait and oil facilities in Gulf States have been hit.

I am sure the environment will thank us for it in some way at some point.

Actually it is not exactly St John’s Wood High Street. It is a shot looking from the end of Circus Road towards St John’s Wood Terrace. The pharmacy with the columns by the door is on the corner, and down to the right is the very first bit of the High Street.

Circus Road got its name because it was intended as a circus, meaning a crescent of grand houses of the kind one might see in Bath or Brighton or Leamington Spa. Perhaps they would have been built in the Regency style. After all, this is really just a stone’s throw from The Regent’s Park just yards from the lower end of the High Street.

But only the first section of Circus Road was ever built and not in the Regency style. it is just a short stretch of buildings in a terrace, with some eateries and a few shops. What marks it out are the very wide pavements on what is a very wide street. It seems affluent just from the broad street. It is lazy and relaxed. People are well off, as they say.

So why the photo? I was struck by the sun that brightened up everything, with a dark sky in the distance, and those red telephone boxes and the white of the silver birch. And those nice buildings, nice windows – all very pleasant.

Upnote is a note-taking app. It’s similar to iAwriter, Drafts, and Standard Notes.

It is also a ToDo list if you want to use that feature.

If you want to sync across all devices, then you have to sign up and then UpNote stores your notes on a Google Firebase server.

If you don’t sign up then your notes will remain local to your device

The mention of Google makes me wonder how much they would be able to snoop on my notes. Apparently the notes are encrypted, so are my concerns assuaged and will I get this  note-taking app?  There are times when price versus everything else wins. And in this case the lifetime (yes, lifetime) price is $24.99. Will it let me down? Is it truly secure? Etc.

As of 27 March 2026 I see the price is now $39.99 Lifetime.

Link to Upnote

BlockNotes

BlockNotes is made by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. It is free to use and the app stores your notes locally (on your machine) as simple HTML files.

Blocknotes never connects to the internet. It’s completely offline and private. Files are stored natively, so you can use another service to sync them across devices (such as iCloud). It’s open source.

On iPhone, there’s a a native iOS app.

That’s how I am using it. I downloaded the Mac OS app and the same on my phone – and it syncs via iCloud.

What is not to like?

Link to BlockNotes