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So I ordered some #WordPress swag this morning, and I’d like to say that I am getting better order status notifications from a home-grown free plugin (WooCommerce) plus probably a low-cost solution for the shipping part than I get from either Amazon or the postal service. This is awesome.

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Update: the bullshit continues. Now one of the other misfit toys is involved and poor Ivan is mad that his account handles were published.

Ivan Soto
blinkwizard.ddns.net
(Email address and IP address redacted, for now)
Why are you mad when ramon taught you a social skill, you were teaching him also though
Also why did you publish my 2 previusly owned accounts?
BTW: Please delete this post if you don’t wanna be punished, according to a dream which ramon dreamt.

And there’s yet another:

Dgleks
soundcloud.com/dgleks
(email address and IP address redacted, for now)
Hey Amanda
I suggest you remove this post, it isn’t nice to write this way about my friend in your website, cause he doesn’t like what you did, at the same time you
are letting ramon to continue this without you even know that
Also: He told me everything about what happened, when I looked at his tweets, and what he wrote is true, and good that you quoted here
this is actually a social skill, blocking because you don’t have a responce isn’t a good idea, at least you might think of an answer.
Also: My Friend dreamt of a god and he told me that if this post is removed god won’t punish you in this world, also I told Ramon not to contact you after
the removal of this post.
you have 72 hours to remove this post, if you didn’t remove it with in 72 hours I’ll take actions against you and I might report you to the federal authorities.

The post stays up. If Ivan didn’t want his secret accounts made public he should have thought about that before he handed them to his little buddy to use as part of a targeted harassment campaign. The accounts have also been reported as being used as part of said campaign, (0171558765 and 0171987816 for reference). They’re also now properly linked in case anyone else these little shitbirds has decided to fuck with also has had enough and wants to report.

Now I’ll just pop some popcorn and wait for the sweet sweet divine retribution I’ve been promised. Oh and that super scarry legal action.

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Hey accessibiliBuddies in case you were wondering there really are developers out there who will tell you with a straight face that you can just sprinkle some ARIA on their totally original non-semantic use of html comments and the stuff inside will be displayed in the browser as they intend.

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Translating Design Wireframes Into Accessible HTML/CSS by Harris Schneiderman
In this article, Harris Schneiderman walks you through the process of analyzing a wireframe and making coding decisions to optimize for accessibility.

The most efficient way to build accessible websites and apps is to “shift left” by incorporating accessibility testing into the earliest stages of your development and design process. In this article, Harris will walk you through the process of analyzing a wireframe from an accessibility perspective and making coding decisions to optimize for accessibility in both design and development phases.

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People aren’t mad at that letter and the people behind it because they hate free speech. A spooled thread.

People are at best skeptical of and at worst outraged by the free speech argument being made in the Harper’s letter because when the inevitable shit starts, (like harassment, for example), the best the people with tons of followers and clout can do is post the obligatory “of course harassment is bad” tweet and once that’s done it’s really easy to just walk away.

I have yet to see any of the people railing against cancel culture address the trade-off trans and other minorities are expected to put up with so their free speech rights can be safeguarded.

And by address, I mean in something other than an abstract fashion. Because it’s really easy to just post that “of course harassment/bigotry is bad” tweet and then just go on with your day while the mentions of the person you’ve decided to go after to your tons of followers are a complete trashfire.

If we were operating in a world where there wasn’t near instantaneous communication, like blogs for example, and we were dealing with a situation where harassment and other such could be and would be completely deleted by the original author, then I could totally understand a near absolute free speech stance and would even go along with it.

But we aren’t operating in that sphere, and as high minded as this whole free speech argument is, it’s not the people making it who are bearing the brunt of the fall-out.

And it would be nice if there were some serious discussion of the trade-offs and maybe even some attempts at putting forth solutions that ensure that everyone’s free speech is protected while also ensuring that all the bullshit can be properly addressed.

It would also be nice if there were some serious attempts at limiting what gets labeled as cancel culture.

I’d suggest narrowing the scope to people being fired for posts on their personal social media by online mobs. And by personal I don’t mean the one you do all your public relations/promotion of your work ETC. on.

Until there is some serious grappling with everything surrounding all this, including the inevitable pile-ons and other shit that happens to marginalized people online by the influencers championing the canceled, there are a lot of people who have damn good reasons to be skeptical of cultural free speech, if not legal as well.

And the general idea that a price has to be paid for freedom isn’t going to cut it. Neither is “you just hate free speech.”

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I can count the people who make a point of objecting to cancellations of people across the board on one hand. Unless that changes I’m chalking all the complaining about cancel culture up to: It happened to someone who is liked/agreed with and that’s the only reason the complainer gives a damn and is willing to label it cancel culture in the first place.

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President Trump is bringing peace to the Middle East by Republican National Committee
PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS CONTINUED TO TAKE THE LEAD IN PEACE TALKS AS HE SIGNED A HISTORIC PEACE AGREEMENT WITH THE TALIBAN IN AFGHANISTAN, WHICH WOULD END AMERICAS LONGEST WAR On February 2, 2020, the Trump Administration signed a preliminary peace agreement with the Taliban that sets the stage to end America's longest war. • Under the agreement, the U.S. will withdraw nearly 5,000 troops from the country in 135 days in exchange for a Taliban agreement to not allow Afghanistan to be used for transnational terrorism. • Time Magazine reported that other components of the agreement included an agreement that U.S. counterterrorism forces stay in the country, permissions for the CIA to operate in Taliban-held areas, and details of how the Taliban's promises to reduce violence will be monitored and verified. • The deal has been called the " best chance to end this conflict ," a " decisive move " towards peace, and " the best path " for the United States. • The war in Afghanistan is the longest in U.S. history, a conflict that has killed more than 3,500 U.S. and NATO troops and cost U.S. taxpayers nearly 900 billion dollars. • As part of the peace agreement, the Taliban and the Afghan government recently began historic peace talks which would end decades of war that Afghanistan has consumed. • The negotiations will cover the terms of a permanent ceasefire, the rights of women and minorities, and the disarmament of the country's many militia groups ."

Update 16 August 2021: The above URL now results in a 404. Continuing the Republican tradition of trying to be cute with 404 templates and failing miserably at it, the page reads:

404 ERROR
IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE AS LOST AS BIDEN IS
LET’S GET BACK ON TRACK

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Migrating an existing site to Gutenberg, day 4, first note: John and I spent a considerable amount of time fighting with, and swearing at, the Bitnami install script for WordPress.

John’s is working right now but I’m about to go through my fourth reinstall of actual Xampp because when you attempt an uninstall of the WordPress module it doesn’t clean up after itself so you have to nuke the whole thing and start over.

Once I figure this out, (I have an idea what the problem is and it has a lot to do with unlabled fields with placeholders that you can’t easily edit), I’ll start writing down all the dumb stuff you have to do with the keyboard and your screen reader to make this work.

And it’s a lot of dumb stuff.

And we’ll also walk through removing the several plugins that get installed with this thing so you can get back to an actual out of the box WordPress installation.

I absolutely despise install scripts that install a bunch of third-party plugins without asking me first. Extra points taken away if they’re plugins I’ll never use or actively go out of my way to remove wherever I find them.

We’re still going to do the manual install as well but now I’m livid at this script and its stupidity and I keep telling myself we’ll eventually get to actual block development.

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Migrating an existing site to Gutenberg, day 3, second note, this one’s shorter.

As I was writing the last note and attempting to add a code snippet, I inwardly groaned at the task of converting all the quotes and other characters into their appropriate character entities, until I remembered that I have Justin Tadlock’s old-but-still-working-just-fine code snippets plugin installed.

Nice, accessible modal for adding code snippets, generates a shortcode for the post.

So it’s coming along with me as we make this migration because the Gutenberg code block would have to be absolutely amazing to get me to switch to it for my code snippet needs at this point.

So Justin’s code snippets plugin is added to the list of plugins that will need to be redone for a Gutenberg world and I will be more than happy to do it myself because I am not giving it up.

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Migrating an existing site to Gutenberg, day 3, first note: This is a long one.

John figured out that you can right-click on the button on the Bitnami page and download your preferred app installation package that way. I looked at the source code for the page and the reason the links for downloads present as buttons is because of this gem: [snippet slug=this-one-weird-trick-to-override-native-anchor-behavior-to-make-it-a-button-with-aria lang=html]Somebody needs to have a talk with the Bitnami people about their Aria flare, because they’ve given the links the role of button, which There are some free WordCamp talks on how to use ARIA properly as well as on how roles work, and plenty of articles written by accessibility experts on ARIA roles and on top of that some courses.

Admittedly I didn’t think to try the right-click-on-the-button trick yesterday when I was fighting with it because I still haven’t managed to wrap my brain around the why of the stupid developer trick of changing the role of a perfectly-working anchor element via ARIA when if you really wanted the thing to be a button you could have made an actual button or even styled the thing to look like a button while still making sure it actually works.

But OK, on to the other bits.

Download the file, and then press enter on it once Xampp is running, and this is where things got weirder.

john got the fields filled in for the Bitnami script, (or at least he thought he did), and got the WordPress installation up and running, only to find that he couldn’t log in and couldn’t reset username and password because the email entry apparently didn’t take.

He fought with it for something like thirty minutes using various bits of Jaws magic, and then finally decided to wait to get the assistance of a sighted person to figure out where things went sideways.

I’ve decided to skip the whole thing and just do a manual install, which I will get to tomorrow. I’m not interested with putting more time into a script for a quicker install than an actual manual install would take.

If John can figure out what the problem is then we’ll write the whole thing up and publish it as a tutorial for those who use screen readers and don’t want to do manual WordPress installs. I’m of the opinion that this is merely putting off the inevitable because when it comes to installing various javascript tools for development or PHP or whatever the command line will become unavoidable, but we’ll offer the option.

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Migrating an existing site to Gutenberg, day 2, second note. I got Xampp running, and am attempting to use Bitnami to install WordPress. The Bitnami page runs better in NVDA than it does in Jaws, but the download still won’t start, so we’ll be installing this manually.

I’m going to download all the necessary stuff so that John can avoid the surprise of trying to use Bitnami with Jaws and Firefox.

You can’t tab through the page, and updating the virtual buffer is a no-go.

Even in NVDA, once you select a download, you can’t tab through the page.

Might have to see if there’s another way to do this.

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Migrating an existing site to Gutenberg, day 2, first note:

This is day 2 because I ended up not working on this on Thursday and Friday of last week. I’m back at it today though.

And today’s first task: Fighting with Xampp on Windows.

I was thinking about attempting this with Desktop Server since it’s already installed, but since we’re doing the Gutenberg thing may as well do it properly with no shortcuts.

So far I have it installed but am having difficulty getting it running, (user account control appears to be the bane of my existence), but will keep trying and hopefully will have something to say once it’s running properly.

Next is installing all the tools.

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53 Resources for Developers & Designers building Blocks for Gutenberg by Birgit Pauli-Haack (Gutenberg Times)
There has been an increase in developer resources around Gutenberg. We collected quite a few here. We’ll update along the way.

This resource from Gutenberg Times looks like it might be a great place to begin with Gutenberg development.

Development note: for the purposes of being able to remember gotchas when developing, I’ve added this development note with this bookmark.

While I’m not sure if this is a function of Gutenberg or not, I needed to manually input the information for the post name but not post excerpt, and I needed to manually input the site name. All of this applies when attempting to parse the information from the URL, which uses the “Parse This” portion of the Post Kinds plugin. This may mean something to look at specifically when migrating that plugin.