The good news
I have met my self-imposed goal of at least one post a day. And that was without having discovered the ‘full-screen mode’ for the editor until just now. (I heard that! For your information, I am being gentle on myself and counting new pages as posts for the moment.)
The bad news
I am counting new pages as posts for the moment. I am seriously lagging behind in simply chronicling what I have done to date.
Feh
Years ago, I was reading a book that I still think of as being about recovering from perfectionism. In the book, the author recounts a story about her boss making her write a sign and stick it on the wall of her office. To the right is my attempt to recreate that sign. Over the years I have come to an ever deeper appreciation of that wisdom. The first prerequisite to doing something is to do it.
At present this blog is driving me nuts.
- It does not fully validate under the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, something that is very near and dear to my heart.
- It is way, way too vertical, something that I find makes web pages hard to read.
- I am not happy with the look-and-feel of the comments.
- Wordbooker is double posting.
- I have the barest skeleton of a testing protocol in place.
But that is rather the point, isn’t it? The stores, blogosphere, etc., are full of excellent texts that will talk you through how to install a specific version of WordPress on a specific platform and create an example blog using a specific version of WordPress, a specific theme and specific plugins. Which would be far more helpful if there were also a slew of wonderful resources where you could learn how to generalize that information. Coached Learning is the only way I know to acquire that generalization skill.
Learning: it isn’t always a pretty sight, gentle reader. For the moment:
- I am running the testing protocol by hand until I get it integrated with Selenium
- I have turned off Wordbooker and will announce new posts by hand for the moment. I am not happy about that as it means comments are not cross-fertilized, but so be it.
- I will cope with the layout until I have testing and accessibility sorted out
- I will consult with my social networks for any wisdom they might have about WP comments
- Once I have Selenium up and running and have caught up with chronicling and documenting the blog to date, I will generate patches as needed to the theme, plugins and if necessary WordPress itself so that my blog validates under current WAI thinking.
In the meantime, I have accomplished all sorts of stuff which I have paid scant attention to being so focused on what was bugging me. Hoist with my own petard. Time to fix that!
thanks for listening,
hilary
