Categories
Automattic Miscellaneous WordPress

New Site on the Block

It’s been quite a few years since the last time I changed my site’s appearance. Since I’m still on my vacation, I figured it’s finally time to change the theme and the overall look.

I wanted a bit different layout, a simple design with a homepage that is both a static page and a blog, with an accent on full-width. As a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, I am using the new WordPress Block Editor (codename Gutenberg) on a daily basis and it’s usually one of the main areas I cover during the screensharing sessions. I watched this editor evolve over the past three years into a powerful tool that provides a new and improved editing experience compared to the Classic Editor that’s been around since the birth of WordPress.

On my site, I’ve been using the new editor ever since it got released but I never fully converted my website to blocks. Until today 🙂

New Site on the Block 1

Let me know what you think of the new look and the 2020 theme I started using! I definitely prefer this design but if you’d like to compare it to the old one, you can check this Web Archive link.

P.S. If you’re still using the Classic Editor, try giving Gutenberg another shot. It offers a lot more flexibility and it’s evolved a lot since its release. And it’s a lot more fun!

Categories
WordPress Automattic

Mobile Blogging Just Got Better

It’s been a while since I started my mobile blogging quest. My impressions so far – it’s a bit more time consuming than writing a post on a computer, however, it’s more fun and it does add a special flavor to publishing. In other words, I can say that I now definitely prefer this way of writing posts 😀

To handle the images I want to use in my posts, I installed the apps Pixabay and Pixlr which help me when I need to download free photos and edit them and the ones I take with my camera. I also use the Trello app to keep my ideas for future blog posts at one place.

Edit: One of the readers, Paola Mesber, also suggested this tool for compressing images in order to reduce their size while maintaining the quality. Cheers 🙂

So, after choosing the WordPress mobile app as my tool of choice for publishing blog posts, I was quite surprised to learn that it even got better with the latest update! The new Aztec editor it uses is incredible! You can now use undo and redo buttons, add bulleting, pagination, read more links, and lots more. I am so happy to see that this app is getting the attention and developer love that it really deserves.

Cheers to lots more blog posts published via the Automattic’s WordPress mobile app 🍷

Categories
WordPress

How to Add a Read More Tag to Your WordPress Website

A visitor browses your website and clicks on Blog inside your menu. You’ve already arranged that the Blog page lists all of your blog posts in a certain order (reverse chronological order by default). The number of blog posts you’ve written so far can be, let’s say, 100. Awesome! And some of them are quite long and the visitor needs to scroll down several times in order to read the entire post.