Housekeeping 1/20/21
Posted on January 20, 2021 Posted by John Scalzi 18 Comments
Small note here that thanks to the lovely people at WordPress, there are a couple minor improvements that have been implemented here today. The first is that now each post has a byline up top, so that you’ll know who is writing a piece even without our pictures and our initials at the end. I think we’ll probably keep up the “picture and initial” practice for now at least, but if we forget and/or write a piece too short for a photo, you’ll still know right away.
The second is that the individual post pages will also feature bylines and dates at the top, which was a thing that temporarily went away when I picked this new theme. I’m very happy about this.
The third thing is that comment preview is back, albeit slightly in a slightly different form than it was before. You’ll see the ability to check your comment when you track down to the comment form, and you’ll be able to switch back from one format to the other. I hope it’s useful for you (here’s a hot tip, whether you use the new form or not: Read your post aloud before you post it. You’ll catch more errors that way. It’s what I do).
Hopefully these small but useful changes will make the site easier to use for those of you who come visit it directly. Enjoy!
— JS
Dear John,
Well, the software update seems to have screwed up my WordPress log-in. I’m not sure it knows who I am any more.
pax / Ctein
Commenting to see if I can get logged into WordPress here.
I can post without having to first exit mobile version!
Yay!
Burma!
(Just testing)
Good stuff John – thx as always
WordPress. ‘Tis a puzzlement.
I’ve noticed that the comment entry box is a lot narrower; guessing that’s from these changes?
One of the things that always bothers me is that there is no Comments link at the end of articles. I always need to scroll back up to the top. Is this something that can be changed also?
The “Show Preview” element is a non-link. It has no href attribute and thus does nothing when clicked.
Huh, preview works for me, although it’s a bit odd.
And the comment box had a little resizing bar. But it doesn’t appear to remember that I resized it when I leave and come back, so if I want the extra space I have to resize it every time.
Preview shows me how my html tags show up, so that’s nice.
I forgot to click the “Remember personal info?” box.
I am ridiculously happy about the dates. Extremely important for contextualizing.
& where’s our Inauguration Post?? I wanna hear what John Scalzi has to say about the Inauguration!
Liking it. And good to have the photo, still.
Do you have other proofreading tips? My team writes technical documents (not manuals) and I’d like to pass on other tips. One I’ve used is to read a document backwards to catch spelling errors (less useful with current word processors.)
.
Preview works in Chrome on my Windows 10 laptop, but I need to tap the “exit mobile version” link for it to work in Chrome on my Android phone.
@Carl: I’m not Mr. Scalzi, but I’ve been involved in some tech documentation back in the day, & there are two additional tricks I know of:
Read it backwards, end back to the beginning.
If you have the staff, have one person read out loud while the other person follows along reading silently.