Category: Software

Cool Tips With Images on WordPress.com

~ Veselin ~ 43 Comments

I have some ideas to share with you, based on my last 24 hours of blogging.

Add Images as Galleries

Have you noticed that when you blog a single image, it’s not clickable and stays small? Like this:

It’s a very large and pretty image but nope, can’t click.

And this is clickable (well, at least clickable from the website veselin.blog):

I used the Image block for the first and the Gallery for the second. So if you want your image to be clickable, use the Gallery instead of Image for single images as well.

You can type /gallery in the editor to quickly find the block. It will appear after /ga or /gal.

You Can Post Photo Comments

This only works when you go to the person’s site and post a comment from WordPress, and not the Reader or the comment notification. The Gutenberg Editor for comments supports adding an Image block where you can copy/paste an address pointing to an image. Just select reputable sources for your images or they might go away soon.

Use Featured Images for Your Posts

The latest version of the Jetpack Mobile app no longer uses the first image from the post on the Mobile Reader and this will likely cause lower engagement with your posts on Mobile if you don’t manually add featured images. The following screenshot shows 2 posts with a featured image, and two without. Despite having a photo on your site, it will only be viewed after a click. Will anyone click a post called “Stesi” with no explanation and no photo? Probably not.

Note that the web Reader is unaffected and will still show your first image as featured without doing this.

Resize Images Before Uploading

It’s very easy to consume all of your space if you don’t resize the photos before uploading them. The default photos that my phone generates are 5-9MB each. Scaling them down to 2000x1500px makes one photo under 1MB and I can upload more than 1000 photos per GB of used space.

Do you have any tips about using images on your blog?

The Single Cockroach Rule

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

Seeing one cockroach under the sink usually means an infestation. Roaches like to hide. It only showed up because the hiding spots were overcrowded.

I like to apply this generalization to software engineering—especially over beer.

  • If you receive a single bug report about a feature you just launched, it likely means the feature is completely broken. Users tend to work around UX issues and only reach out to support when things are really bad and they have no other options.
  • That one security, usability, or other issue you noticed in a pull request? If there’s one in the PR, there are probably more in the adjacent code.
  • A missing space in a code change? That usually means there’s no linting in place.
  • A missed edge case? It might indicate something is off in our testing process.

The way I defined this Cocroach Rule matches the definition of a Hasty Generalization. After all, one cockroach—or one bug—is a sample size of one. There’s always a chance that a reported issue is an extreme outlier, something no one else will ever encounter. Maybe a high-energy particle hit a chip somewhere. It happens.

But my long-term experience shows that the Single Cockroach Problem largely holds true. It applies in many areas where the difference between zero and one is significant.

Cindil Pindil and Djasta Prasta

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

Once upon a time, a widow had twin daughters with very different personalities: Djasta Prasta was lively and cheerful, while Cindil Pindil was quiet, hesitant, and cautious. When their mother gave them fabric to sew dresses for Easter, Djasta Prasta eagerly began working—cutting, sewing, and fixing mistakes as she went—finishing her dress in time for the celebration, even though it had issues. Meanwhile, Cindil Pindil spent so much time worrying about making mistakes that her dress remained unfinished.

When the festive bells rang, Jasta Prasta joined the dance in her new dress, while Cindil Pindil stayed behind the fence, watching in tears. From that day on, people say it has always been so: “Cindil Pindil behind the fences while Djasta Prasta dances”.

This is a short version of the Bulgarian folk tale, written by Georgi Raychev in the 1930s. It became part of the culture of my generation. Felt inspired to publish it here after mistakenly sent out a test post to my subscribers. Sorry about that! 🙂

Disconnected my Facebook

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

Facebook keeps flagging my posts as spam. I’m not sure how that happened. Is it an AI assuming that my achievement post about a walk under 10 min/km is spam? Maybe one of my followers on Facebook flags me? It doesn’t support any way to be challenged other than using court. The court process is not a path I want to pursue. That would take over a decade for my country, and I might be the first one in the whole country trying it.

What in a fitness achievement post with no links, on a site with no ads or affiliate links is spam, remains unclear. Facebook does Facebook things.

Here’s my response:

This is one of the reasons why the open web and WordPress are so important, and the walled gardens are evil. Facebook offers no way to challenge a decision like that. A blogger whose income depends on this connection could experience a detrimental impact. I lose access to promoting my posts to the 3-4 friends and family who check it on Facebook. Not pleasant but not terrible.

EDIT: I actually found a link that allows challenging the decision and clicked it.