2018: Day 215 the one with some Gutenberg WordPress

Dear Reader,

You may or may not be surprised to find out that I have not been very excited about the new Gutenberg writing interface for WordPress. My writing routine pretty much involves opening a word processing application and typing. For years that was Microsoft Word and recently it has been Google Docs. Between those two applications my writing career is pretty much complete. Right now WordPress seems to be trying to get me to create using Gutenberg. That did not happen tonight. I’m writing write now in a Google Doc file and this passage of prose will be cut and pasted into the blog post you are reading. Working in that fashion does not appear to be the ended form of creativity for the new Gutenberg editor.

Cutting and pasting this block of prose over to WordPress was really weird this time around. Instead of just dropping the text in and checking to make sure the formatting was ok things got a little bit weird. Apparently, the power of the Gutenberg visual editor is to take the things that I just wrote in this Google Doc and parse them into pieces and in the process of doing that make things better. I’m really not sold on this new writing method. Maybe being this stuck in my ways is a sign that things are changing around me faster than I am evolving. Perhaps this is just an example of how I should return to my original philosophy on blogging or posting content online. Way back during the end of the last century I had just wanted to drop files online in an open and unstructured way. At this point, it might be easier to just make a directory of word files and post them each day. Probably the main reason that has not been my writing method is that it makes the content less approachable and consumable.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado