wordpress

Require a “More” block in WordPress posts

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As a WordPress user or reader, you might have noticed that some blogs and websites use a “More” block to break up their content and display a teaser of the post on the homepage or archive pages. This feature allows visitors to see a preview of the post and decide if they want to read more.

Personally, I enjoy adding “More” blocks to my posts, so that people that subscribe to email updates about blog posts, still have to visit the site to view the whole content. This helps me track actual interest in the posts, as they get page views.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how you can require a “More” block in your WordPress posts to improve user experience and engage your audience. 😊

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Blogging without the Internet

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I planned on blogging being one of my relaxing hobbies while sailing around the Atlantic Ocean ⛵, and though we managed to keep a sailing blog up to date I found it extremely hard to write tech-related blogs while crossing oceans without a speedy or any internet connection.

The setting (of writing these blog posts) is rather beautiful, but to date, I have only written a single blog post when without a connection at all on this blog, now doubling that list to 2 with this post 🎉.

This was not because I didn’t have things that I wanted to write about, but rather that unless you are prepared well, there always seemed to be some element of my blog post writing process that would require access to something that is online and not on one of my local devices, or that only using local devices just ended up being a giant pain 🤦.

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Avoid image indexing in robots.txt

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People might not want images from their websites to be indexed in online searches for several reasons.

  • To protect their intellectual property or copyrighted images from being copied or used without permission
  • To reduce the usage of the website (bandwidth) by people finding and using images
  • To help protect the privacy of those included in images

I have no problem with images from this blog appearing in search engines but recently wanted to add some protection against usage/indexing for another site.

I did some thinking and research here. Search engines have some help pages for their indexing such as Google, but each each search engines help pages only talk about their own search. In reality you probably want to use User-agent: *

So here are some easy to copy and paste chunks that you could look at using…

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Modifying default width of WordPress pages using new themes like Blockbase

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I switched to the Blockbase WordPress theme a few weeks ago as it supports full-site editing, which brings blocks to all parts of your site rather than just posts and pages.

I found the content to be quite narrow out of the box at 620px.

Screenshot showing narrow text out of the box with the Blocbase theme
Screenshot of the default content width (620px) from my 4K display

I really wanted the default view for folks with wider screens such as myself to be a little wider, so I went on an adventure to change this.

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WordPress plugins

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Back in 2018 I wrote a post listing the WordPress plugins that I use on this blog. That post only received 122 views, but it was specifically written for some folks I know that are running WordPress blogs. Another friend (you know who you are) recently told me they were thinking of starting a blog, so here goes with a small update around the WordPress plugins I now use.

Generally, I would describe my blog as a developer blog, so there is quite a heavy focus on code, embedding code, security and making sure things are right with https and not leaving 404 pages behind.

Comparison

So what has changed in the last 3 years? 3 plugins have gone, and 8 have been added! And yes, this is a complete list.

Find links in the Notes & Discussion column where I dive into a few different categories of these plugins.

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WordPress plugins

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2021 EDIT: There is a new version of this post available with a plugin list from 2021 :)

A few people I know are now running WordPress installs, or are currently setting them up. The one question that always seems to come up while discussing them is “what plugins are best”? I try to sum up what I use below (in alphabetical order), as well as how these might be changing in the near future due to the new Gutenberg WordPress editor.

I won’t bother to list some of the more common plugins such as Akismet Anti-Spam or Jetpack, as these are already pretty visible in the WordPress world.

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