If you’re familiar with the general appearance of an RAMH post for the last few years, or even if you just poke around into recent posts shown in the “Hats Recently Chased” sidebar, you won’t notice much if any difference in the specific appearance of this post: the colors and fonts are the same, the Japanese running-after-my-hat banner is the same, and so on.
But…
In my previous “Admin” post from a few days ago, I mentioned I’d be plunging (finally) into the new(ish) default editor for WordPress posts — a version which goes by the name “Gutenberg.” The image atop this post is a partial screen capture of what I myself saw a few minutes ago, when I started editing the post. (It would have been very confusing to me if I hadn’t already seen similar user interfaces elsewhere.)
That box over at the upper left of the image (“Search for a block,” “Most Used,” etc.) isn’t always there — only when you click on the little plus-sign-in-a-circle icon above it. The sidebar to the right, with the Document and Block tabs: it can easily be suppressed. So what, then, might I be seeing at first, if the sidebar were gone? Something more like this:
See the difference? Greatly reduced, almost nonexistent clutter. It’s just a, well, a blank page.
Fancy that: a “writing” interface which doesn’t distract the writer with a lot of menus, toolbars, and other optional clutter. Oh, the clutter is there, all right, not far away once you know what triggers its appearance. But otherwise, it’s just you… and a universe of unwritten content. (Of course, that universe has always been there. But all the baroque trim — the bells and whistles, the switches and buttons, the GUI bric-a-brac of the contemporary “word processor” — all that has been crammed into a toolbox and then shut up in a closet. Refreshing, in a way.
Which is not to say, naturally, that this initial transition has been utterly painless for me.
For instance, yesterday’s whiskey river Fridays post I thought might never get completed. Not only did I have the usual content-related challenges — selecting from the week’s whiskey river bounty, finding related quotations from other sources, identifying some media element to drop at the top of the post for its initial catch-the-eye value. But this time, I also had to contend with the forced distancing from the look-and-feel elements. How to create blockquotes, for instance? How to make things italic, make things hyperlinks, make things italicized-AND-hyperlinked? How to create the custom-formatted captions I’ve always placed under each figure at the top of a post?
Speaking of captions… The two captions on the images in this post look slightly different, don’t they? One outside the box, one inside. Another thing to try understanding…!
Looked at another way, I guess, yesterday’s post was an excellent learning opportunity. As has been this post, for that matter… I’ll “get” it eventually, I know, and probably come to wonder why I ever resisted. In the meantime, from your perspective nothing much should change.
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