This cottage is in the grounds of Cambridge Botanical Gardens.
From the road you get this view. There’s a little stream next to the road, right in the foreground and not so obvious in this shot.
I took the photo yesterday when Tamara and I were walking back from an appointment just down the road from there.
I went into the Botanical Gardens today and thought it was an opportunity to see the rear of the cottage. I could see the roof and the upper floor, but that was all because the building is surrounded by a high wooden fence.
Outside of that is a vegetable garden and a gate that says ‘private’.
It’s like a gingerbread house, near but out of reach.
This post is not about WordPress.com. It is about WordPress.org – the version of WordPress that you can download and import into your own self-hosted website, as many people do.
Although this posts is not about WordPress.com, I think there are lots of people who do have their own self-hosted sites as well as sites here on WordPress.com, and that is my reason for posting it here.
By way of background – at the moment, Gutenberg is available as a plugin for self-hosted sites. Soon though it will be added to the core code of WordPress.
It occurred to me today that some of the extra Gutenberg blocks that people are making, and which are available as plugins, could start to clutter up sites with lots of plugins.
So I asked a question.
I have asked this question today everywhere I can think of.
I have asked it on the Gutenberg forum and on the Gutenberg group on Facebook, and on WPTavern, a website that specialises in all things WordPress. I have had some answers already, and some surprises.
The Question
So – to the question, which is this:
I am going to ask a question as a non-developer, perhaps as a typical user of Gutenberg when it reaches core.
At the moment, Gutenberg is a plugin. A few people, Mike McAllister and Danny Cooper to name two, have made additional blocks that are available as plugins.
When Gutenberg goes into core, I will want to use some additional blocks (pricing tables from Danny Cooper would be an example).
If that block is in a collection of blocks available as a plugin I could add the plugin.
I could then end up with many plugins, really only wanting just one or two blocks from each plugin, and perhaps lots of repetition because the different plugins cover a lot of the same ground.
In an ideal world, I don’t want extra plugins on my site if they don’t need to be.
Is there a way I could extract the blocks I want, keep them and remove the plugin? Would reusable templates enable me to do this?
Is there a different way to do it? Will there be a repository of just blocks and only blocks that can be exported to a site without the need to add a plugin at all?
So that’s it. I’ve had some answers from a few developers already and I will crystallise those into something when I have more of a handle on it and post it here.
I asked three copywriters about the word ‘copywriting’.
I asked Tom Albrighton, asking ‘Why is copywriting, as in writing copy, one word?
I should point out that my wife was a book editor and worked for many well-known publishers, and things like ‘copywriting’ and ‘copywriter’ jump out at her. A copywriter – a writer of copy. Yes, but how did copywriting come about? Why not copy writing?
Tom replied:
“Good question.”
This is his book – the one that my wife spotted on my pile of books.
I asked Glenn Fisher, saying ‘My wife and I were talking and she noticed a book on my pile of books and asked a question, which I am putting to you as a person with a wide education who talks about the benefit of reading around a subject.
Can you tell me why the art of copywriting is not the art of copy writing? How did it come to be this one word ‘copywriting’?’
Glenn replied, saying
“The honest answer is I have no idea.
But it’s an interesting question, David.
I assume it’s derived from a piece of writing being know as ‘the copy’ and therefore the person who writes the copy becomes know as the copy writer and it eventually joined to become a noun.
I’m not sure it’s the best description for what we do. It’s almost impossible to describe oneself as a copywriter and expect someone to know what one does.
I often just refer to myself as a writer these days.
Let me know if you get to the bottom of the conundrum.”
I asked Drayton Bird the same question, and he replied:
“I have no idea.
But I do think that the two words could be construed as writing that copies.
Copy-writing, however may work.
Anyhow the word copy goes back to the use of the word copy, used in newspapers.
Drayton”
I didn’t really understand Drayton’s answer, but the last bit reminded me that the word was used / is used? for the piece of text that is going to be used in an article in a newspaper, as in ‘Have that copy on my desk by nine o’ clock tomorrow morning.’
Do you dear reader have an opinion on the subject, or know something of how copywriting as one word came about?
There are 450,000 installations of Gutenberg, according to Gutenstats.blog, which is a count of the WP.com sites that have activated Gutenberg and of self-hosted sites that have Jetpack installed and have activated Gutenberg.
The site also lists the number of posts written. The count started in late August 2018, and when I looked at the stats just now it said that over 250,000 posts have been written and that 6,264 posts were written yesterday.
The number of posts does not include those on self-hosted sites that have Jetpack activated. That’s because Jetpack doesn’t ping WordPress.com when a new post is written.
And it does not include posts on self-hosted sites that do not have Jetpack activated.
On my self-hosted sites I’ve written around 40 posts using Gutenberg, so multiply that number (and more) by the number who have it installed on their self-hosted sites and it’s easy to see that the actual post count will be much higher.
By the way, I saw this info in an email Matteo Duò from Codeable. You can sign up for articles on Gutenberg by going to Get Ready For Gutenberg on the Codeable site.
I have to smile. Gutenberg has this giant test bed of WordPress.com users giving it running feedback. And there is more feedback from thousands of self-hosted users who are using it and breaking bits of it and reporting the issues.
On the stairway of the Historical Art Museum in Vienna
If my memory serves me correctly, this sculpture is on the stairway of the Historical Art Museum in Vienna.
I don’t know who the parties are, or the sculptor (oh how time runs on when one is intent on getting somewhere else) but it might show the centaur Nessus being killed by Heracles.
The poignancy in the sculpture is that the centaur’s tainted blood in turn killed Heracles.
Alternatively, the sculpture shows Gutenberg slaying the old WordPress editor.
Caxton
Gutenberg (as in Johannes Gutenberg) died in 1468.
William Caxton was an English merchant who worked in Europe and who in 1476 moved back to England and introduced the printing press into his home country and was the first English retailer of printed books.
If you are English you learn about him in school.
I mention it because PootlePress have introduced a plugin of additional Gutenberg blocks for sites running WooCommerce on WordPress and using the Storefront theme. They have named their blocks Caxton.
If you’re writing a post using Gutenberg and you want an image in a post to be a clickable link to a URL, here’s how to do it.
Unlike most things in Gutenberg, it’s done in the sidebar. Add the image and then in the sidebar where it says ‘Link settings’ there is an option for a Custom URL.
I am going to link this image of a Gerbera flower (I think that is what it is) to the About page on this website, but I could link to any URL and not just on this website – any page, anywhere.
If you are interested, you can read more about our recent trip to Vienna, and about fiakers (horse-drawn carriages), and the life that revolves around the hub of the Inner Stadt, in this post on the Quillcards Blog.
“To use inline elements in Gutenberg, insert the cursor at the position where you want to insert the inline element.
Found the instructions in a discussion on Github.
OK, let’s try it. The first thing I found is that the image should be small.
By that I mean is should not be so tall that it would increase the distance between the lines of text by pushing the lines apart to fit the image, because that looks bad.
So, here is some more text I am writing, followed by placing the cursor and adding the inline element block with this tiny image of an envelope that is 15x21px. It is small enough that it does not reach or interfere with the line of text above. And it works. (At least in the Preview it works…)
It might need a bit of experimentation to get it to render correctly relative to the line with a different theme. I know that is the case, because I tried it on the Editor Blocks by Danny Cooper on a self-hosted site and the top rather than the bottom of the envelope was on the line.
And I was able to add a link within the image – click the envelope to try it.
Doing this again with the little blue envelope but a different link.
