Category: WordPress

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.

365 Days

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

I challenged myself to do a 365-day blogging streak last year and managed to do it. I have to admit that I messed it up a few times mostly during trips, most recently 2 weeks ago in Agaete.

The blogging streak doesn’t work very well with timezone changes. You can be on a streak, come back home, and the streak is broken 5 times over the last 7 days. So I had to change post dates and slightly cheated to keep it going.

The Reader Council

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

There’s a new initiative by Dave Martin, WordPress.com’s lead of the new Social team called Reader Council. The Reader Council will be a p2 blog dedicated to hearing the community requests for Reader improvements and bugfixes. I’m very happy that this is happening and I hope it makes the Reader better, and our blogs cooler.

AI and Blaze

~ Veselin ~ 14 Comments

The AI ad generator outperformed me in Blaze.

Blaze is WordPress.com’s internal ad system (Tools > Advertising). I decided to give it a try and ran 2 campaigns. The first was for a random Book post with an AI generated ad, and the second was for one of my best long reads with a hand-crafted ad copy.

The AI-generated one had a $0.3 CPC compared to $0.56 for my post. I also got fewer impressions.

The CPC that I achieved was okay but my blog is not a business, and doesn’t deserve it yet.