John's Green Blog

Doing less and writing more.

techiesearch
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Category: techie

  • WordPress Blocks

    This is a blog post about blog posts!

    Test links – gr_links prev – «

    Test links – gr_cat link – techie

    I’ve got skills … I still maintain these five blogs:

    What is it?On my laptop?On the server?
    whufu blog
    the Stories part of whufu    		./wordpresswhufu.com/wpwhu/
    my 2010’s blog
    Mostly health events    		whufu.com/wptest
    My 2020’s blog./wp_storieswhufu.com/wpgreen

    The second half of the 2010’s and 2020, 2021 and 2023 were the heyday of my road-trippin’ When I was back in Reno between trips, the great bulk of my computer time was spent on adding content, adding features, and fixing bugs in my road trip website – whufu.com.

    It the early 2010’s I still have a few paying software gigs which took more of my “tech energy”. Somewhere around the time I started getting Social Security (1948 + 65 = 2013) I just stopped trying to hustle new work. My SS check would cover my Reno condo payment and my piddling living expenses, with some left over, so why now fully retire?

    Health Blog

    Looking back, I guess this was my first WordPress experience.

    My adventure to Istanbul took place in 2009. I took my laptop with me, so I passed the long days of recovery bloggong my little heart out about the decision to go and how it all shook out.

    So by the time 2010 rolled around I had a nice little chronicle of my Istanbul aventure on my laptop, but no way to share it. That’s when I started my decades long relationship with Dreamhost.

    WHUFU

    But I digress… The point for this story is that I still had top-notch PHP stills, pretty good MySQL skills, and was passable in Javascript, CSS, Unix and whatever new thing peeked across my horizon.

    So I started working on an app to share my very interesting road trips

    I knew I wanted to share stories, pitcures and daily logs. Pretty early on I figured that addong maps of each trip was also achievable.

    • I designed and implemented a database to tie it all together.
    • I made my own homegrown code for the daily logs.
    • Started a new WordPress blog as the repository of my daily stories.
    • Collected the pictures and tried various tools to show them

    I would do each trip on the laptop, edit the pictures and the stories and make the map

    Post Road Trip blog

    In terms of live-altering personal events, the biggest change in my life since the first serious heart attack in 2009 was the second serious heart attack in 2024

    I have many, many thoughts about choices I made before, and choices I made after. Those thoughts constitute a good portion of the posts in this blog. The choice that matters here is that after I got setled here in the old folks home in Rohnert Park (sigh…) I started getting those techie urges again. It’s in my nature, I guess 🙂

    No more road trips, so no more whufu or whufu blog. The good old health blog (whufu.com/wptest) that had done it’s duty almost 15 years struck me as kinda stodgy and limited for what I wanted to do now. Rather than hack it up for new things, I decided to start a whole new blog!

    Re-learning WordPress in the age of AI

    Decided to do this blog as Blocks.

    It’s been quite a struggle

    Choosing a theme

    putting a style together

    Discovering new WordPress quirks

  • Design Notes for Greenblog (and more?)

    • techie
    • techie
    • https://colorhunt.co/
    • 10/11/25 – Suddenly obsessed with fonts for the blog
      • goto: Appearance > Customize > Fonts or Appearance > Editor > Styles > Typography
        • currently: Platipli and Ysabeau Office
          • body text: Ysabeau Ofice light
          • headings: Platipli regular
      • I think I want this plugin:
      • also https://wordify.com/blog/wordpress/wordpress-fonts/
        • roboto – largely geometric, with open curves that look friendly and futuristic.
        • Poppins – geometric, clean design. .. each letterform looking almost monolinear
        • Merriweather – good on screens
        • Montserrat – geometric sans-serif … the official font of Mexico!
        • Open Sans
        • Lato – semi-rounded strong letterforms — a “serious but friendly” vibe
    • October thought: Since you’re doing smaller posts – one per review – it would be really cool to thread them in cool ways:
      • mysteries / city / country / parts of country / other countries / other books!
    • GOALS
      • Make wptest more interesting
      • Make wptest a health-only blog and move other stuff to green blog
    • Post to build!
      • Reviews!!
        • One review per wp post.
          • title / date / author / what / review date / summary
          • type list – title / uthor /
          • date list – most recent
          • genre list – detectve / westers
        • do them while I’m reading the book.
          Also, tv series … there’s always another!
        • Books, Movies, Series, other?, Puzzles, Sports games 🙂
      • Related but different is basketball courts, cars, foreign places,
      • Random, loving road trips (let’s me link to all the road trips
        • east coast, florida, colorado, northwest, southwest
      • Sort of like a Category except more so, there are “areas”, and each member post links to all the others.

    Cool images I might use:

    10 cool blogs

    1. Bella and Bloom ok
    2. All the Food maybe
    3. Seasons in Colour maybe
    4. The Ultimate Photographer maybe
    5. britdotdesign maybe
    6. Life As We Explore travel blog
    7. Urban Roots maybe

    from here: https://www.wix.com/blog/blog-design#viewer-f6q6a

    Design an eye-catching homepage
    • your homepage needs to convince visitors that your blog is worth exploring. It should grab their attention and inform people immediately what the core purpose of your website is.
    • you’ll also need to think about how to best navigate visitors to it from the homepage using a menu bar.
    Utilize a header on both your homepage and your blog page.
    • A header is the top strip of each page on your site. It helps set the tone and conveys what readers can expect from their experience.
    • You can even customize your headers for each page if you wanted to.
    • You should include the name of your website, your logo and even a high quality image if it’s in keeping with the tone of your site.
    • You may also want to use a navigation menu so visitors can easily make their way from page to page.
    Incorporate empty space
    • Too much text and an abundance of images can appear messy and unorganized.
    • Your blog should flow seamlessly so visitors can easily navigate from one page to the next.
    • Empty space allows readers’ to make sense of the components on each page, guides their eyes and helps frame the written content.
    • ALSO: Bold typography: Using bold fonts for headers and key sections to create a strong visual impact and improve legibility of your posts. Make your headings pop in the right places.
    Display article thumbnails
    • The page that houses your articles needs to be engaging, colorful and easy to explore.
    • Displaying thumbnails of each article in a grid or listicle format is the best way.
    • It keeps all of your content organized and accessible, and readers can quickly scan the various titles
    • Make sure to include a title, date and an image that goes along with each post.
    Show related posts
    • To keep site visitors engaged on your site include a Related Posts section.
    • You can include this in the middle of an article, so readers will scan past it, or at the bottom.
    • Including your most popular articles is a strategic way to leverage this section because this is the content in which readers find the most value. You’re therefore more likely to get the attention of new visitors from these same posts.
    Tips to increase sharing
    • Write more long-form content, referring to blog posts with 1,200 words or more.
    • These articles generate three times more social media shares than shorter content, and enabling sharing capabilities allows you to leverage this opportunity.
    Add an About Me page
    • Your blog design should include an About Me section.
    • It will inform your visitors who you are so they can know who is authoring your content.
    • Include a picture of yourself and a short bio, including the motivation behind your blog.

    Notes:

    When designing a blog we recommend focusing on the following parts:

    • Homepage
    • Headers
    • Logo
    • Empty space
    • Simple navigation
    • Article thumbnails
    • Related posts
    • Social media sharing
    • About page

    I think this is a great list. I don’t care about “Social media sharing” (and maybe not “thumbnails”), but the others are very good.

    • cohesive visual style
    • search-friendly – include meta tags, keywords, and other SEO-friendly onpage content optimizations
    • Then comes ten examples…

    The hints in the wordpress book about doing stuff with the title were great!

    Block patterns explained.

    Block Pattern Directory