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Determining Good Syndication Defaults

I’ve been very reluctant to set defaults for syndication, making options be selected each time instead. This is a bit problematic because I like to reduce friction.

The issue is that I don’t want them to be global. I want them to be a bit more granular.

For example, a hallmark of a note for me is that is doesn’t have an explicit title. Maybe I want all notes to go to all services that support them unless I say otherwise….

I am worried about a mistake I made years ago involving importing old posts… so the code needs to check the published date and not post anything old automatically.

Responses to URLs on a syndication site should automatically go out to that site…but not necessarily to other sites.

I had a discussion about this with my Indieweb associates at IndieWebCamp San Diego and I’m still not sure what I’ll end up doing.

I found out why it was harder to get a hotel this weekend in San Diego. Apparently, the American Society of Hematologists is having their annual conference and exhibition. I spent over an hour trying to get a ride out of the airport, surrounded by people with conference swag. Not sure how many attendees, but 32,000 people attended last year according to their site.
During this trip, I got frustrated when I made an order in a local business I expressed asked for them not to give me something, Mentioned it three times, asked them to confirm, But brought it back with me to the venue I was at and low and behold…The thing I asked them not to give me. This is like when I go to a restaurant and ask for a my drink with no ice and no lemon and one of those things shows up. I normally don’t write about such things…but I told this story several times to people and I was told that if I told the same story 3 times, it needed to be on my website. So here it is.

Switched to ClassicPress

A few weeks ago I decided to switch this site to ClassicPress. The recent WordPress drama was merely the final straw.  It was years of the block editor, aka Gutenberg.

I want to write content. The block editor feels like I am typesetting a magazine. The classic WordPress editor feels like I am writing content. Most people don’t need to handle the level of visual manipulation WordPress now makes default.

Matt, the cofounder and leader of WordPress wrote about this in 2017. And it mirrors that thought. I have issues with the classic editor and how integrating certain metadata works…but the benefits of a simple text entry for the bulk of my content can’t be denied.

There comes in ClassicPress. And I have my criticisms there too. Nothing is perfect. Currently tracking with WordPress 6.2, they are committed to a leaner version of WordPress that focuses on a classic editor experience. Version 2.3.0 just came out, and updates dependent libraries, removes Javascript in favor of HTML5 elements…instead of layering on more and more client side Javascript to help things run.

In previous versions they added categories and tags to media, redesigned the media modals to remove additional deprecated libraries, added security enhancements, and…in a feature I didn’t expect and cannot find much discussion or posting on, adding a new object relationships table.

This makes it possible to relate any object in ClassicPress to any other object. All that’s needed are the object types of the two items and the ID of at least one of them. Being as I am keeping compatibility with WordPress at this time, I have not used it for anything…though I can think of some great uses.

To quote the ClassicPress team themselves…it is not just WordPress without blocks, it “is developing its own personality, while performing faster than WordPress and with a codebase that’s only around half the size”.

I will continue developing for both platforms…and not specifically developing blocks because they do not interest me. But I look forward regardless to what we can build.