note
· · to read

Everybody’s new #WCUS selfies and headshots were making me jealous and agrevating the fomo, so I decided to bite the bullet and put some work into customerservant.com

I’m just focusing on a few simple things today because, well, I need some easy wins.

Right now it’s just a picture and some text on the website, cleaning up things that aren’t being used, and then later on after the State of the Word, some things I need to have my host handle.

I’ll do some more complicated work tomorrow during the contributor day.

But, starting is much better than planning and not doing, so I’m taking the easy wins for now.

note
· · to read

I think I’ve figured out a solution to my Twitter difficulties, specifically trying to manage two accounts. I have EasyChirp open in the browser for my personal account, and Open Tween open on the desktop for my work account. I suppose I could just use a private window in the browser as well for the other account, but as far as I can tell, you can’t respond to direct messages using EasyChirp, so I need a way to respond to those along with viewing two accounts at the same time. I have no idea what I’m going to do about managing the other accounts I have access to/manage. Open Tween will handle multiple accounts, but I’m still trying to figure out how you tell which one you’re sending from. Standard tweets are still easier from my websites. I already have the tabs open and it’s just easier to send from there. No character limit, plus all the other Indieweb advantages, while reading/retweeting from Open Tween/EasyChirp. Yeah, this is really complicated and hacky, but I think it’ll work.

note

· · to read

I’m helping a screen reader who has been recently introduced to WordPress configure their new site, and noticed that they were becoming frustrated with the clutter of their WordPress administration menu thanks to plugins arbitrarily adding things to their top-level menus and inserting their own top-level menus in between the out-of-the-box ones. I had them install Menu Humility by Mark Jaquith. Despite the plugin not being updated in over a year, it still works exactly as it is intended, and I install it on every new site I build and every site I rebuild. I’ve mentioned this plugin before on this site, but wanted to mention it again because I find it so useful in my quest to minimize the trashfire that can result when plugin and theme authors clutter the dashboard in order to fulfill their own hopes or desires for more downloads or upgrades with no regard for the users actually using WordPress. If you’re running the latest version of WordPress, (and you really should be), upon viewing the plugin in the plugins/add-new screen, you’ll get a notice that says “untested with your version of WordPress.” In this case, ignore that notice, because this still works, thanks to WordPress’s commitment to backwards compatibility. This isn’t so much an accessibility issue as it is a “get off my lawn, stop cluttering my dashboard with your crap, my dashboard isn’t your playground” kind of scenario. Menu Humility isn’t the only plugin that can help with dashboard clutter, but it’s the first step to making it a saner place which induces less rage. Go get it if you haven’t already.

note
· · to read

Dear fellow developers: If you’re one of those developers who makes it impossible to press the tab key to move through a screen, hand in your dev creds now and put down your IDE until you learn to do better. I should not have to get help from a sighted person to add FTP users to a server. This is becoming a serious problem. Learn HTML damn it! Learn HTML as if I am going to find out where you live.

note

· · to read

I should be able to charge extra for editing content on any site with Visual Composer involved. That plugin is the bane of my existence, and the sooner it completely disappears, the better. It is absolutely possible to edit VC content by hand. This is also absolutely not a skillset I should have to maintain. We have standards for a reason. It is very time-consuming and tedious, along with probably being traumatizing, for anyone to have to learn the non-standard idiosyncracies of this kind of generated markup. Friends don’t let friends use this plugin. Enemies probably shouldn’t let enemies use it either.

note
· · to read

Researching if I can add blocks in Gutenberg using the non-visual editor by typing block comments. As long as the interface is inaccessible I have no problem hacking around it if possible, I will not be cut off from the future of WordPress, temporarily or otherwise.