I’ve had a Sesame Street moment this past week. Do you remember the recurring segment “One of These Things?” Like in this video, three things are alike, and one is close-but-no-cigar. I’ve also been having an Andromeda Strain Moment. Huh?
I know, these seem to be unrelated, and when am I going to get to the one-liner that is the purpose of Linda’s challenge. Stay with me, you might find this interesting, if you’re a blogger on WordPress. If you’re not interested in WordPress things, you might want to skip down, look at the one-liner and move into the gallery. It’s OK, I understand.
I reported two problems to the Happiness Engineers last week. One, a situation where the Notification Pane (the thing that opens on the side of your browser when you click on the bell icon and shows recent likes and comments) started opening on its own. It blocked my sidebar and the sidebar of any blog I visited, and it could not be closed.
The other problem is one that has been happening regularly for a few months. I write my blog posts in Microsoft Word. I paste the text into the Block Editor and format the text there. Sometimes, when I make a minor change to a bit of text (not necessarily an entire block) all the paragraph blocks collapse into a single paragraph. It’s usually such a mess that I start over.
I’ve had other weird things happen with blocks, but none of them had anything to do with the Notification Pane (not like the others) so I reported the notification pane separately. See below for resolution.
The Happiness Engineers were leaning toward the collapsing blocks being my problem—they can’t recreate it in the lab—until I sent them a video of it happening. I still don’t have enough information for them to recreate it—I can’t even reliably recreate it—but I think they understand this isn’t my fault.
OK, so what’s up with the Andromeda Strain?
I had been searching for a place to stream the original version of that movie for years. I finally found one (Movietime). After telling my wife about my success, she asked me if I had ever read the book. I think I had, but in the ‘sixties. She bought me a copy, so I’ve been rereading it.
If you’ve read the book, or seen the movie, you might remember my one-liner (finally):
“We’ll know that…when we know why a sixty-nine-year-old Sterno drinker with an ulcer is like a two-month-old baby.”
Not much help, I know.
But it made me think.
While the blocks collapsing into one blob of amorphous text is the most annoying problem I’ve had with the Block Editor, it isn’t the only one. In addition to that, I’ve experienced:
- When I paste text in from Word, every paragraph break (hard return) turns into a new paragraph block, except the last one. I almost always have to manually break the last paragraph out on its own once in the Block Editor.
- Sometimes, when editing a column group, one column will absorb the contents of the column to its right. I am unable to undo that behavior or edit the column that was on the right.
- Frequently, if I’m trying to select a paragraph, to apply a color or a font attribute (bold, italics) the editor highlights the entire bit of text, but only applies the attribute to some of it. BTW – To select the entire block so that it all stays selected, triple click in the paragraph.
In my last reply to the Happiness Engineer, I suggested that these isolated annoying incidents may not really be isolated. All of these represent a case when the Block Editor loses track of a boundary or a series of boundaries. Maybe Word and WordPress designate paragraph breaks in a slightly different way. Maybe the Block Editor gets confused. I don’t know, but I suggested they look for other complaints that are similar to mine.
If you have experienced any weird block behavior on your blog, let me know in a comment. I have a theory as to what’s causing these problems, but it’s not fully formed. I will keep sending examples to the Happiness Engineers, and I will let you know if I hear anything.
As for resolutions:
The Notification Pane problem was a problem with WordPress and it was fixed.
The problem with blocks is still in the “we-can’t-duplicate-it-in-the-lab” state, but it’s been suggested that I avoid pasting text in and work exclusively in the Block Editor. I have several reasons for preferring to work in Word, not the least of which is that I’ve had posts I’m working on in the Block Editor disappear into the ether. I like having backups of my posts. Sorry for the length of this post.
This post is part of Linda G. Hill’s fun weekly series One-Liner Wednesday. If you have a one-liner, or if you would like to join in on the fun, you can follow this link to participate and to see the one-liners from the other participants.
All five of my current books are now available in audio book form thanks to Amazon KDP’s Virtual Voice process. The voice is AI generated, but I can honestly say, it’s pretty darn good. The audio books are reasonably priced (all below $7 US) and, if you already own the Kindle version and want to add an audio version, you can do that for $1.99. There is a five-minute sample on the book page for each book. If you’re interested, click on any of the Dreamer’s Alliance book links below the image or on the link below for my latest book.
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