Author: Rylon

A fresh coat of paint

~ Rylon

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed there’s been a design refresh around here! Unless you’re seeing this in an RSS reader, in which case the image below might give you a bit of a clue what’s changed – you’ll have to come visit the site directly to see for yourself.

A computer interface button which is old Windows 95 on the left, and new Mac OS X "Aqua" on the right.

When I originally migrated this blog over to WordPress, I was using a paid plan which didn’t allow you to install custom plugins or custom themes, so I was pretty limited in what I could do to personalise things. I explored the available themes, but none of them really stood out to me, and many of them were designed for huge magazine type websites, rather than just a simple blog. In the end I settled on the Penscratch 2 theme, as it felt like it got me the closest to “just a blog”, without being too heavy.

I customised it as best as I could, but the limited options within my price plan only let me change the default fonts, and set a few colours, but that was about it. The block-based Gutenberg editor let me customise the home page, and add things like social links to the footer, but anything more drastic was very much off the table. It was “good enough”, but I was never fully happy with it, and the “Business” plan that claimed to offer full customisation was substantially more expensive, so I kinda parked the idea.

Recently I decided to do something about it, and started looking at the various managed WordPress solutions out there. A lot of the “fully managed” ones seem to be targetting places like design agencies who would likely be running several sites on their WordPress setup, or companies that want to use WordPress as their intranet/CMS, so the prices were all going to be more than I was paying now, and all I really needed was the ability to customise a bit of CSS, so I kept looking.

I toyed with the idea of just running it myself on a cheap VPS (as a DevOps Engineer I’m perfectly capable of doing so, after all), but I wanted the blog to be low-maintenance, and not worry me about software updates. I did briefly consider “what if I just run it in Kubernetes?”, but running an entire Kube cluster for a single WordPress felt… a bit ostentatious 😅

I’d pretty much given up again, but one day I was looking at a VPS which had a “one-click install” option, I went back over to WordPress.com to compare the prices, and I spotted something surprising!

WordPress.com admin page showing Custom CSS was now included!

Custom CSS was now included?! Since when! Honestly, I don’t know, but I immediately went to check in the Gutenberg editor, and was thrilled to see that I could indeed edit blocks to add whatever CSS I wanted to them!

But the absolute crème de la crème was to be found in the Appearance → Customize section of the admin pages, which also sported a brand new “Additional CSS” textbox, letting me apply any CSS I liked to the entire site. Amazing!

Aqua infusion

Regular readers will know I’m a bit of an Apple fan (understatement of the year nomination 🙈), with a particular soft spot for the days of Mac OS X and “Aqua”, so newly liberated with custom CSS capabilities, I decided to give the blog a fresh coat of paint with a modern twist on the old Aqua interface.

I’d always disliked the squared corners on the main page, so I added a nice border-radius to round those off, and a drop shadow to visually separate it from the background colour. Next, the pinstripes of the original “Cheetah” release of OS X needed to go in, but I didn’t want them to overpower things too much, so I added a “panel” design to the sidebar widgets with a subtle gradient, which I think stops them from blending in too much with the content.

Next I wanted to fix the menubar, which previously was just plain text links, and I had always found them to be too small. This actually took a lot of trial and error to get the colours right, as I wanted the buttons to light up when hovering over them, as well as reacting to being clicked, but I’m pretty happy with the end result, and of course this styling needing applying to the “Search” box in the sidebar too.

With the biggest pieces done, the rest of my changes focussed on polishing. Adjusting padding and margins here, font sizes there, centre alignment of the footer widgets, removing unsightly gaps between elements, and so on. These were all little annoyances I hadn’t been able to do anything about before, so it was very satisfying to finally be able to put them right.

In the end I’m really happy with how everything has come together. I think it looks much better than the old design, and it feels like I’ve finally made the blog my own.

Liquid Glass and the end of flat design?

~ Rylon

I’ve always been a huge fan of the skeuomorphic design of the earlier iPhones, they seemed so quirky, and full of character. I loved all the little details, like how the reflections on the chrome volume slider would react and shimmer, as if light were really reflecting off as you moved the phone around. Or how the notes app had little torn pieces of paper from previous notes. I even loved the Rich Corinthian Leather™ of the calendar app, complete with the fancy stitching, it felt luxurious, especially on the first high-DPI “Retina” displays.

When iOS7 came along back in 2013 it was quite a departure from what we had become used to, with seemingly all of that personality thrown away. Gone was all the depth, texture, and character, and in its place we had super thin text, an endless sea of white backgrounds with no shadows. It felt almost “clinical”. This “flat design” has dominated the industry ever since, and although Apple did walk back some of the more extreme design choices in later software releases, I still missed some of the quirky and whimsy designs we used to see; apps that felt like they became the thing they were imitating.

There’s a great quote I read in a blog post called “The Death of Design” that captures how I feel about what we lost with the move to flat design:

We designed things just to see what they might look like. A calendar app, a music player, a weather app made of chrome and glass. Were they practical? Not always. But they were fun. And expressive. And strangely personal. We shared them on Dribbble, rebounded each other’s shots, iterated, and played.

I remember spending hours on the tiniest details of an interface element no one had asked for. Just… exploring. Pushing pixels for the sake of it.

So when rumours started circling that Apple was going to be redesigning things this year, I was excited to watch last week’s WWDC 2025 Keynote to see what they had been working on, as they unveiled this new design language for all of their operating systems.

“Liquid Glass” as they are calling it, seems to be a step in the right direction, where the user interface is composed of pieces of glass that reflect the world around them, responding to and reacting with light how it would behave in the real world.

As an example, we can see a button here reflecting the yellow of the control above it, as two objects would do in real life:

There are also some really nice playful elements, for example the way folders open and close as you hover over them, and convey their state with subtle clues in their icons, for example when you place files in an empty folder, the icon changes to show that, with a little bouncy animation. Elements feel quite expressive and organic. Liquid is the perfect term for it. It’s taking what we’ve seen from the Dynamic Island on iOS, and applying it to the whole system.

Source: @marioguzman on Mastodon
Source: Apple WWDC2025 Keynote

I’ve seen people referring to this new expressive era of design as “Neumorphism” or “Physicality”, and I can highly recommend reading Sebastiaan de With’s excellent blog post on the topic of Physicality, over at the Lux blog.

After watching the Keynote, I do have a couple of concerns. The first one is around text legibility. In some of the examples they gave, the text was quite hard to read, especially with busy scenes where your content is very visible through the glass UI controls. Some apps feel better than others in this regard, so I’m hoping that will improve during the betas.

The second concern is around information density, which still seems to be under attack. Apple is clearly going all-in on “consistency” across all their platforms, but I worry that we end up losing something in the process. For example, on macOS we now have iOS-style alerts which are narrow, and stack all the buttons vertically. This feels like an odd choice for a desktop OS which is used exclusively with big widescreen displays. Why not play to the strengths of each platform?

Overall though, I’m really excited to see how this all ends up coming together, especially when they’ve finished polishing it for release this autumn, and I can’t wait to try it out for myself.

Visual Voicemail is actually pretty great

~ Rylon

Yes, I know. I’m sure some of you will be thinking this is a bit of a random post, as you double-check your calendars to make sure that it is indeed the year 2025. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start talking about fax machines and record players, but I wanted to share some recent experiences with good old Visual Voicemail.

History

I remember my first mobile phone had voicemail, but the process to listen to your messages was a bit tedious. If someone left you voicemail, the network would send you a text to let you know, along with the number that called. As this didn’t link to your address book, you’d have no idea who it was unless you’d memorised all your friends’ phone numbers, so you’d then have to dial the voicemail service to listen to the actual message.

After navigating through the various menus, the caller’s number would be read out slowly, one… number… at… a… time, and finally you’d get to hear the message itself. After struggling to decipher the low quality recording, and assuming you even recognised the voice of the person, you could then return their call. And that’s assuming the message you wanted to hear was the first one in the list. You may have had to listen to several before you got to the one you wanted. Not really the best experience.

When the original iPhone was revealed back in 2007, one of the features they mentioned for the “Phone” app, was Visual Voicemail, which Steve Jobs described as “Random Access Voicemail”, and it worked more like email than the system we were used to. New voicemails would just show up in the inbox for you to listen to, in whichever order you wanted, and you could easily scrub through the audio, then return the call with a single tap if you liked. It even let you record a custom greeting right there in the “Phone” app. The difference was night and day.

There was only one slight complication – this feature required support from the mobile carriers to work; it wasn’t something that could be done entirely on device. Here in the UK the iPhone launched on the O2 network, so they supported Visual Voicemail from day one, but incredibly there are still some networks that don’t support it, even after the iPhone stopped being exclusive to O2.

SIM hopping

For various years I’ve been hopping between networks to take advantage of the best deals, and there’s one thing that I always, ALWAYS notice, and that’s whether the network supports Visual Voicemail. Every time I try a carrier that doesn’t support it, I think maybe I can live with it, maybe the deal is so good it’s worth the trade-off, but every time I try, I’m wrong.

Issues with signal quality are surprisingly common in the UK, so missing a call on a network without Visual Voicemail feels a bit like being thrown back in time. Dialling a clumsy old voicemail service rather than having my messages magically appear as soon as I get better signal, always leaves me pining for this simple little service from the original iPhone.

And it’s not that I’m some sort of celebrity, dealing with hundreds of calls a day! It’s just that the way we communicate with our friends and family has changed. These days we tend to text more than we call, keeping in touch with our loved ones via group chats and photo sharing. But this means if someone does call when I’m out of service, it’s usually for something important that I don’t want to miss.

Taking it to the next level

Since I’ve recently returned to a network that supports Visual Voicemail, there were some new features introduced back in iOS 17 that I had wanted to take for a spin, and I’ve found them to be really useful.

Live Voicemail

This feature is really handy for screening unknown numbers. The way it works is your phone answers the call, but Siri does the talking, asking the caller to leave a message, as if they had reached voicemail. But as the caller is speaking, their words are transcribed in real-time, so you can see on the lock screen what the call is about. You can even decide to pick up if it’s a call you actually want to take.

Transcriptions

The transcriptions captured from Live Voicemail are saved in the Voicemail tab of the Phone app, but what about regular Visual Voicemail? Well iPhone automatically transcribes those as they are delivered from the network, so you’ll get a transcription no matter which method you use. I’ve found it very useful, and the quality seems pretty good, with only occasional mistakes, which are usually self-explanatory based on the rest of the message.

Getting out of the way

Overall, these features work so well together, they make it a breeze to catch up on any calls I miss when I’m out and about, and are a great example of technology helping to make things easier, rather than getting in the way. For me, that is truly technology at its best.

As an aside, I wonder how many younger people today know that the voicemail icon represents an old reel of audio tape? 3D-printed save icon anyone?

CleanShot X

~ Rylon

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. At work I end up taking a lot of screenshots when giving demos, or to help my colleagues reproduce a bug I’ve found, as screenshots make it so much easier to get my point across. Of course, macOS has a built-in screenshotting feature, but CleanShot X really takes this up a notch in a number of ways. Here are some of my favourite features.

Annotations

As soon as you capture your first screenshot, it goes into an area called Quick Access, where it waits until you need it. From there you can quickly bring up a full size preview of your screenshot, and easily add annotations including text, shapes, arrows, and more. From there you can simply drag your newly annotated screenshot directly into other apps, like Slack. There’s no need to save the file first, so you don’t end up with a desktop filled with junk you no longer need. The process is super slick, and saves me a ton of time throughout the day.

Quick Access can hold several screenshots until you’re ready to work with them, and it’ll even move between displays as you move your mouse, so they’re always nearby.

Video

Sometimes, a screenshot won’t cut it, you need to capture a short video. CleanShot has you covered here too. It can easily produce video clips either as MP4, or as GIF. The full size preview in this mode also lets you quickly trim the clip, and can even capture any audio your Mac is playing at the time.

This is very slick, and because CleanShot encodes the video efficiently, you end up with much smaller file sizes, which is perfect for sharing. I’ve found it also does a great job at producing compact GIFs, without the quality sacrifice you see in other solutions.

OCR

Optical Character Recognition or OCR is the process of capturing text from inside images. CleanShot has a built-in OCR reader that allows you to take a screenshot of any block of text, and convert it instantly into actual text which is placed on your clipboard for you to paste into other apps. I use this when doing tech support so if someone sends me a screenshot containing an error, I can easily copy the error message text from the image, and paste it into my search engine to help me troubleshoot the problem.

Customisation

There’s a lot of polish and attention to detail in CleanShot. For example, the developers realised that many people use personal photographs as their wallpaper, so there is an option to use different wallpaper when capturing a screenshot to keep that private. You can also go further by hiding your desktop icons completely, and choosing a plain colour for the background, which looks really tidy.

When capturing windows, you can choose whether the background is visible, and whether or not the window has its drop-shadow. You can also customise the image and video format to use when saving files.

Finally, there are even settings to capture the mouse cursor, highlight clicks, and display any keystrokes on screen, which I find useful when recording demos, and will really help your screencasts standout.

Summary

Overall, CleanShot X is one of those fantastic little applications that really feels at home on a Mac. Powerful, yet easy to use, with a great fit and finish, as they say on their website, it really does feel like 7 apps in one, and I highly recommend it.

CleanShot X by MTW https://cleanshot.com

CleanShot X provides over 50 features making it the ultimate screen capturing tool. Capture your Mac’s screen like a pro.

💰 $29 one-time payment, includes one year of updates, but the app is yours to keep for as long as you like. Renew for $19 to get a further year of updates.
$10 a month for a subscription including cloud features and storage.

Compact macOS menubar icons

~ Rylon

When Apple released macOS 11.0 “Big Sur” back in 2020, one of the changes they made was to increase the gap between icons on the menubar. During development the gap was enormous, but it was eventually toned down for release, based on the negative feedback during testing.

People with a lot of menubar apps found the icons took up too much space, so tools like Bartender became popular to help keep things under control. Later when Apple released the first MacBooks with a notch, people even found their icons disappearing underneath it!

So what can we do about that?

The first thing to do is look to see if any icons can be removed, for example with things like battery life and volume being accessible in Control Centre, maybe you don’t want discrete icons for those? You can quickly remove them by holding Command (⌘) and then dragging the icons off the menubar.

Mind the gap

Once you’ve removed any unnecessary icons, you can modify some hidden macOS settings to reduce the gap between each icon, so they don’t take up as much space. Simply open a Terminal window, and run the following commands:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int <integer>
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int <integer>

You’ll then need to log out and back in for the changes to take effect.

I found values of 8 and 6 looked best to my eye, but you can experiment with different integer values to find your favourite.

Before and after, it’s subtle but with a busy menubar it can make all the difference. Shout out to iStat Menus for the performance monitoring widgets you see here.

Undo

You can easily restore the default setting at any time with the following commands:

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding

Don’t forget to log out and back in again for the changes to take effect.

Enjoy!

OrbStack

~ Rylon

Last year I wrote how I’d switched from Docker Desktop to Colima, but later that same year I stumbled across a brand new solution that was in development, called OrbStack. The author was pretty communicative on Mastodon and so I downloaded it during the beta to take it for a spin, and was immediately blown away.

Containers should be a joy to use, not something you have to put up with. Let’s build the future of dev envs.

https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1750965469518176438

So what makes it so special? Well let’s start with the performance. OrbStack is fast. How fast is it? Well I’ll let one of my Mastodon posts answer that question:

https://mastodon.social/@rylon/110509034462228406

That’s right, after rebooting my Mac, the OrbStack user interface was up and running before the macOS Dock had even finished sliding up from the bottom of the screen. Everything about OrbStack is so fast you never feel like you’re waiting for it, it just gets out of the way and let’s you get on with things.

Another thing I really appreciate is the entire user interface is native SwiftUI. There’s no slow clunky Electron code to be found here. This means not only does the app perform faster, it also feels right at home on macOS. Controls behave how you’d expect, and it follow the system conventions properly.

Like Colima, OrbStack is a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop. This means you can install it over the top of your existing Docker Desktop setup, and it will Just Work™. In fact it will offer to automatically import your existing container images and stotage volumes when you first run it, which is a nice touch.

Value added

There are a ton of features in OrbStack that really demonstrate the attention to detail and care, which shines throughout the product. They’re so numerous in fact I could spend a week talking about them, but instead I’m going to list a few of them here:

  • Automatic HTTPS certificates and DNS for your containers
  • Rosetta support for transparent x86 emulation
  • Start/stop containers from the macOS menubar (including Compose projects)
  • Explore Docker images directly using Finder (they can even show up as disk mounts)
  • Two-way file sync between containers and your local filesystem
  • Easily search through logs with a native log viewer (supports clickable links in the output)
  • Automatic cleanup of unused build-caches to save disk space
  • Much lower energy usage

The list goes on! Check out the feature comparison between OrbStack and Docker Desktop to see a more complete list.

Kubernetes and Linux

OrbStack also provides the best local Kubernetes story out there.

You get a single-node Kubernetes cluster which has been optimised for development, and because it uses the same container engine as the rest of OrbStack, all your Docker images are immediately available for use in pods, without needing to push to a registry. You also benefit from the other OrbStack features, for example automatic DNS names for your pods and services, no need to mess around with port forwarding. Ingress resources will Just Work™. It’s super slick.

As if all that weren’t enough, OrbStack even allows you to spin up Linux virtual machines, again with a level of polish that really sets it apart from other solutions.

Summary

I’ve been using OrbStack since the early beta, and immediately subscribed when v1.0 was launched back in September last year. In that time, it’s gone from strength to strength, continually adding great new features that really sets it apart from the competition. I love the proper native macOS application, the sheer speed, and all the nice “quality of life” features that make it a joy to use, and recommend you give it a try today.

OrbStack by Orbital Labs https://orbstack.dev

OrbStack is the fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux. Develop at lightspeed with our Docker Desktop alternative.

💰 Free for personal use, $8 per month for business/commercial use.

Not so smart assistants?

~ Rylon

I really like using Siri to get things done when I’m not able to use my phone normally. For example, when cooking I can quickly add things to my shopping list as I’m using them, so I’ll remember to buy more the next time I’m at the supermarket. Or if I’m driving somewhere, I can easily control my music, or reply to a friend to let them know if I’m running late.

When Siri works, it’s brilliant, but there are times it can be incredibly frustrating to use.

On it… still on it…

Every year at WWDC we hear from Apple that Siri can do more and more things entirely on-device without needing the Internet, but in practice it still seems to suffer from connection issues (even when all my other devices are fine). This usually manifests as Siri responding with the phrase:

On it….. still on it….. something went wrong!

As soon as Siri answers any request with “on it…” I know with 100% certainty that the request is going to fail. Even worse, if you immediately ask Siri to do the same thing again, it will then typically succeed! I really wish Siri would just retry the request itself silently, and save me from hearing that dreaded phrase again.

Split personality

I have a couple of HomePod minis (or is it HomePods mini?), one in the living room and one in the kitchen. When cooking it’s handy to set various timers, so obviously I ask Siri to do that, but if I go into the living room, and ask Siri to check on the status of the timer, it acts like it has no idea what I’m talking about.

Me: “Siri, how long’s left on the timer?”
Siri: “There are no timers on HomePod.”
Me: *sigh* “Siri, how long’s left on the kitchen timer?”
Siri: “There are no timers on HomePod.”
Me: *SIGH* *walks to Kitchen* “Siri, how long’s left on the timer?”
Siri: “There’s a timer with 4 minutes left.”
Me: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I found something on the web

I’ve also had interactions where Siri gives me an example of some phrases I can use, only for it to turn around and say it has no idea what I’m talking about when I try to use them. Or it just abandons any attempt at understanding you and does a web search for what you asked. This usually isn’t very helpful, and it’s completely pointless on HomePod, given it lacks a display. Siri will chastise you in that case, and tell you to “ask again from your iPhone”.

When it comes to memory, sometimes it will forget what you were talking about mere seconds earlier, forcing you to repeat your request in full, trying to get the syntax correct. It’s like typing into a command line, rather than having a conversation.

By comparison, when this does work it feels so much more natural. Asking about the weather, then following that up with “and what about tomorrow?” flows quite nicely. It can also be quite clever, for example, if you’re asking about “tomorrow”, but the time is after midnight, it will check if you actually meant today, which is probably what most people would mean in that case.

SiriGPT?

Can an LLM like ChatGPT help here? I’ve seen a few articles this week claiming that’s exactly what Apple is working on for iOS 18, and I think it would make a big difference. ChatGPT is already so far ahead of Siri simply in terms of how natural sounding the conversations with it can be. They can be quite convincingly real.

I think it would substantially improve the experience if Apple could integrate those conversational features into Siri, but they will need to be very careful to handle the fact that LLMs hallucinate a lot, which is to say they can generate output that sounds plausible, but is either factually incorrect or totally unrelated.

Although Apple hasn’t jumped on the current AI bandwagon yet, they’ve actually been using machine learning (ML) technology in their products for a while now. They tend to use ML in more subtle ways, such as separating a subject from the background allowing portrait mode to be applied to your photographs, or in real-time during video calls. It also powers the Visual Look Up feature that helps you identify people, animals, plants, and more. There are tons of little features like that throughout Apple’s operating systems that rely on ML behind the scenes.

The good news is Apple’s privacy focus, and the presence of the Neural Engine in all their CPUs, means they are able to run a lot of the ML models entirely on-device. I’d expect no less from a next-generation Siri, and for a smart assistant with so much access to your personal data, this can only be a good thing.

The Sum of its Parts

~ Rylon

I recently started a new job, and one of the upsides is that my computer isn’t locked down into oblivion, so I can actually use a lot of the features that make the Apple ecosystem so great to begin with!

Universal Clipboard now works properly, so setting up things like my HR profile was as easy as copying the image I wanted from my phone, then pasting it on the new Mac. It made the setup process so much faster and smoother.

Reminders sync properly so I can create a “Work” list, and add things to that list as they pop into my head. Or quickly add a personal reminder if something comes up during the work day. The old way involved me sending an email to myself, either at my work address, or my personal address, depending on the subject. Then I’d “process” it the next time I was on whichever device had the relevant mailbox configured. Yeah I know 🙈

I can now make use of separate profiles in Safari, to keep personal stuff and work stuff in their own sandboxes, but if there’s something like a bookmark I need, which is in another profile, I can easily find it without much friction. A useful tip here is that you can configure Safari to always open specific websites in certain profiles. I use that to make sure any YouTube links I click on open in my Personal profile, where I am subscribed to YouTube (who wants to see that many ads?!).

It also allows me to bring my collection of useful apps along with me, without needing to buy them all again every time I change jobs, as well as benefit from any subscriptions I have.

Being able to use my messaging apps again means I’m not stopping throughout the day to get my phone out and respond to friends and family. I can quickly respond on the Mac when needed, and then continue with my work without losing my momentum.

Finally, I can access my music streaming without having to fiddle with my phone. It can be a hassle to switch audio between my Mac for calls and then back to my phone for music, now it’s all in one place and much simpler.

Overall, I used to face all these little points of friction throughout my day, but now they’re gone. It made me think of the old saying:

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Those individual elements aren’t revolutionary on their own, but when they work together smoothly across all my devices like this, it really feels like the technology is serving me, not the other way around.

Lakewood City Cinematic

~ Rylon

As the release of Cities Skylines 2 draws near, I wanted to give my old city a proper send off, with this cinematic made in the style of a drone video.

Lakewood City I’ve been working on for a few years now, adding a park here, a train station there, and slowly growing it to the size you see in the video. I had started some other cities, but in between breaks from the game I’d always find my way back here, as the first city I started in the original Cities Skylines.

Enjoy!

Back to WordPress

~ Rylon

The more astute readers out there will have noticed that there’s been a slight design change around here. I’ve actually just finished migrating from Hugo to WordPress. But why? When I first resurrected this blog, I wrote a post about my reasons for selecting a static site generator (Jekyll then Hugo) in the first place. So what went wrong?

Well to be honest, although the setup was working really well most of the time, there were a few situations where I found it lacking.

Drafts

I was finding the process of writing a draft post a bit “fiddly”. Because every commit to the blog’s Git repository is deployed automatically, I couldn’t commit any unfinished writing without first remembering to set some special flags at the top of the post, in the front matter. Those flags would need to mark the post as a draft, tell the system not to render the page, and not to add it to the posts list and RSS feed. Occasionally I would forget those steps and accidentally “publish” a half-finished mess. It was a bit frustrating.

Image galleries

Dealing with images was also painful. You’d need to deal with naming them, putting them in the right subfolder, and then adding them to the document using a shortcode. I ended up writing some custom code to make creating a gallery of images easier, as I was finding myself making use of the feature quite often, but it was still quite painful to deal with.

Writing on the go

The static site generator approach required me to have a way of writing Markdown and then committing it to a Git repository, then finally pushing the changes up to GitHub. There were plenty of times where I’d be waiting for an appointment, or going somewhere on public transport, where I could’ve done some writing, but this process doesn’t lend itself well to a smartphone environment. It just wasn’t feasible.

I tried to get a workflow going using a really nice Markdown editor called iA Writer, which is a great bit of software, but I was still left with the problem of how to manage the Git side of things. Writing the posts was one thing, but getting them published via my Git workflow just wasn’t a great experience on the go.

Looking at alternatives

If something isn’t working right, try something different. There’s really no need to settle. I decided to look into my options.

I started with some research of various approaches. I wanted something flexible, but not complicated. I wanted something that had a nice editing experience, and good performance. I had also decided that my days of self-hosting were over, so I wanted something that provided a fully hosted version, so I could forget about managing anything, and just focus on writing.

I looked at what some of my friends were using. Things like Medium, or Substack seemed to have a slightly different aim, and I wasn’t sure about some of their policies. Eventually I found myself right back at WordPress. Many years had past since I last used this software, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how it had evolved, so I decided to take it for a whirl.

Gutenberg

The star of the latest version of WordPress has to be the new Gutenberg editor. This new way of creating your posts and pages relies on a range of different components called “blocks”, which you can move around the page as required, and it really gives you a huge amount of flexibility. There is an interactive demo of Gutenberg which you can explore for yourself to see what I mean.

Some of the block types Gutenberg has to offer

Themes that support this type of editor are pretty customisable too, offering predefined areas on the page for you to edit, such as footer, sidebar, and header areas, giving you a remarkable amount of flexibility without needing to do any coding at all. You can also create reusable templates of common blocks to avoid having to edit them in multiple different places.

Initially I did find it a bit daunting, but I stuck at it, trying the various pieces out, and in the end I found that I quite liked it. I decided to bite the bullet and started the process of moving back to WordPress.

Migrating

I decided to migrate my previous posts manually rather than using a tool. This gave me the opportunity to re-work some of the posts I was less happy with, and after all we were only talking about a dozen posts, so I knew it wouldn’t take too long. This also gave me the chance to check the formatting, make sure hyperlinks worked, and to take advantage of the Gallery block to upload the full sized versions of any images I had used.

Migration was straightforward because in most cases I was able to copy and paste from the existing site into Gutenberg, and it correctly interpreted everything, including subheadings, code blocks, and even things like pull quotes; they were all converted correctly into the equivalent block type.

Finally, I decided I didn’t want to have to deal with comments on the posts, so I turned off the entire commenting feature. I figured people can always reach me on Mastodon to discuss things, and having to deal with the inevitable spam here didn’t appeal.

I checked everything looked good, checked the RSS feed was working properly, and hit the button to go live. The rest, as they say, is history.

I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out, and I’m hoping this will encourage me to post more as well.

Here’s hoping!