And I’m still enjoying the ride !
Category: WordPress
Things I did not like on WordPress.com in 2016 – ep.1
In a few days it’ll be eleven years that I’m writing here on WordPress.com … and lately I have mixed feelings on the platform.
Some of the new features introduced in 2016 were not of my liking, so I thought to write them down and focus my ideas so to submit them to the Automattic’s team on UI and UX.
The new footer
A new Footer Credits Option was introduced earlier this year.
While I do understand the need of affirming the WordPress.com brand for site hosting (mainly due to the rise of Medium.com as a full featured publishing platform with huge social media echo and integration), I find that not all the options proposed are respectful of my Author status. “Powered by WordPress.com” is – to me – the most right option.
I am not a member of WordPress.com ‘firm’, nor I do feel particularly inside a ‘WordPress.com community’ … since I do participate in any event or coordinated writing effort. So “A WordPress.com Website” or “Blog at WordPress.com” seems misleading to me.
I think that given the WordPress community standards behind Automattic this can be played better in 2017…
Missing template reference
Another personal chagrin is the loss of the mention of the template used by a particular blogger.
Lots of times I found myself discovering the available templates available here on WordPress.com … and being surprised by the stuff published by the various authors and the way they pushed the ‘limits’ of the theme they choose. In this, to make an easy example, my friend Riccardo Mori at System Folder is a master. Now … imagine you go ‘in love’ with the theme he is using: how much efforts do you have to make to see what template is he using if you want to adopt on your WordPress.com space ?
I can understand that if I am in a paying tier this option of hiding my tools and specs … like you can do when you buy an expensive Mercedes. But on free tiers you are hiding a potentially useful information to the platform users…
What do you think ? Let me know in the comments!
Back to Independent Publisher
After some weeks of experiments I’ve switched back to Independent Publisher as the main theme/template for this weblog.
Even if the WordPress.com version is quite a bit different from the Author’s version I still find it as one of the best – free – plain and honest bloggin’ theme here on the platform. So I’ve switched back to it and customized a little the sidebar. Probably I’ll change the colors/fonts combinations a little more but, if nothing else comes in the way, I’ll stick with it for a while.
Also I do have to make amend for the poor curation of many of the links proposed here without a comment or a word on why I’ve found them worth mentioning them here. This is one area of improvement goals I’ve set myself for the upcoming eleventh year of this blog…
As usual I’m eager to read your comments and ideas, so please share them with me in case!
Celebrating the 1st year of Italy’s WordPress Community on Slack
Sara Rosso’ recipe for a good WordPress website
During last week-end I had the chance to read over some old post in the When I have time weblog of Sara Rosso. Those slides were made for her speech at the latest International Food Blog Conference in Sept. 2015. I thought you might enjoy it as well as I did …
Academicons, a font icon set for academics
For working reasons I had to work on a project at work were for each researcher I had to link a ‘social’ profile, not on Facebook or other popular – consumer – networks, but for some specialized ones … like ReaserchGate, Google Scholar, Mendeley, etc.. If you’re into academics you know them. Here is Academicons →
With a bit of luck I found a GitHub project by James Walsh, a post-doctoral researcher, were he made and collected a series of font icons – 100% compatible with the more famous FontAwesome that solved my need with few lines of code.
10 (ten) years of WordPress.com
Last week was a busy one, and the notification system of WordPress.com didn’t put enough emphasis on it but … I’ve just passed the mark of 10 years of WordPress.com use last Jan 2nd !!!
WOW! Time flies … seems yesterday I’ve signed in but so many changes have happened in my life and over the platform and WordPress ecosystem of services (JetPack, Gravatar, Akismet, PoolDaddy and so on).
Looking forward the next ten years! Thanks for everything!
