I know, another blog that doesn’t continue the eOS saga, but I’ve got things to a point that I really need to be trying to use it on a daily basis and I just don’t have the time, or faith, to attempt that at the moment. Hopefully, I will at some point, but for now it’s somewhat parked.
Now I’ve caught the blog bug, though, I have spent a little more time playing with WordPress which I was finding a little clunky to use with the vanilla install I’d created. I mentioned at the start of my blogging journey that I’d set-up a WordPress server as I was working for a client that provided multi-site WordPress to its customers. On that basis, I’d set-up a multi-site WordPress server, as I had a few ideas about using for other things (my company website for one) but other than trying a few different themes, I hadn’t done much with it at all, other than a plugin for 2FA to secure things a little more.
Editing pages wasn’t particularly user-friendly, but I found a plugin (TinyMCE) which gives me a menu bar and icons to access different formatting tools, which is really great. I’d also found a better Gallery plugin (NextGEN Gallery), which I might eventually use to showcase some of my photographs, which the stock app didn’t really look up to. I still have a problem with that in terms of the file size upload limit (1MB, really?) that I need to resolve, but I suspect it’s just a change to a config file somewhere. The Jetpack plugin looks really good for some basic statistics and the Akismet plugin for spam protection (although as it’s really just me reading this they’re not all the useful, at the moment!)
UPDATE: As you can see from later blogs, I managed to sort out the file size issue. I’d updated everything in the PHP settings and couldn’t see anything in the theme config file, but a little more Googling told me that for multi-site WordPress there are also some settings that control the file sizes. Updated there, and voila!
Spelling was always a bit of a challenge, not helped by the new keyboard on my MacBook (which seems to have seriously decreased my typing accuracy) and I couldn’t find a decent plugin that provided spellchecking. I did stumble across Grammarly though, which has added spellchecking into Safari, so not only does it work on WordPress, but everything else I do in the browser. So far, this is proving to be a great find and is highlighting how sloppy my online persona had been previously!
As for Themes, I’d played without about 15-20, before finally settling for the default Twenty Sixteen. It’s nice and simple and looks pretty good too for a personal blog. I think I’ll be using Sydney or ResponsiveBoat when I think about updating my website, although still need to play around a little more with Drupal and Joomla which might be better options than WordPress for that.
Keeping everything up to date is a challenge, as with only the above plugins and themes there always seems to be something needing to be updated. Fortunately, the snapshot functionality in FreeNAS is great for protecting everything before an update. I’ve already run one that broke something (not sure what) but I could just rollback the snapshot and try again.
Anyway, that’s all for now. Back soon with probably another non-eOS update 😉
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