I'm splashing about with the technical options in this Posts section, trying to get a handle on the easiest processes, best settings, and most user-friendly presentation format. As photography is featured here regularly, I'm also learning how to integrate that medium well. Not every post will have one or more images, but those that do deserve to have good layout and nice caption options. The latter is especially important, as McDougall & Hampton succinctly remind in their book:
"A publication's credibility is damaged when captions slip into a quagmire of cute commentary or falsehood."
What I've learned so far…and forgive me, this is a documentation note to myself as much as anything—is that Pagelayer is not a good blog editor or entry tool, but that the default "Posts" tool built into WordPress also has some hangups and formatting failure-points to be wary of. I should know if this default mode is called "WonderBlocks," but I'm just not certain because of the way the editing layout changes. Moreover, because the default editing view is not WYSIWYG, I have also determined through experimentation that:
- Editing a post with an image is necessary in Pagelayer if one wants to designate a feature image for the post, instead of just the default Croxton Media logo showing in the thumbnail.
- Still on Pagelayer, editing a given post using this tool, may also activate the presence of a comment entry form, which is not a feature I'd like to implement in this blog. Back to the default editor for Posts, where…
- Lists are "hemmed in" to enumeration inflexibly; bullets may be, too
- The "pull quote" formatting modifier makes the quoted text center aligned (!) and displays in an arbitrarily much larger typeface
- The standard quote formatting modifier may be invisibly stacked, and have a compounded effect—ala, dramatic over-indention, that is then impossible to remove as an attribute
- Because it was impossible to end an enumerated list once one has begun it, I am just stacking additional behaviors and concluding thoughts as though they belong
- It is clear that editing is not like LyX, nor is the typesetting output like LaTeX. Not that I would expect it to be, but something on the order of a crude Notion interface would have been passable.
- Maybe the most burning question is whether, apart from images, inserting a code block of formatted HTML output from a preferred document processor would bypass some of the cruel and unusual messes of the formatting tools provided?
- Finally, all of this makes me very curious how the remote posting option (sending a post as POP3 email to a private address) formats images and text.
McDougall, A., & Hampton, V. J. (1990). Picture Editing & Layout: A Guide to Better Visual Communication. Viscom Press.