My friends south of the border inaugurated a new president this week. All of them seem to be really happy with this, and thus, I am too. Happy doesn’t quite sum up the tweets and conversations I’ve seen, though. Perhaps the right words are relief and hope. 🇺🇸
Speaking of the inauguration, there was one clear standout to me. And, if you watched it, I suspect to you, too. If you didn’t, then I promise you’re in for a treat. Amanda Gorman’s recital of her own poem was breathtaking. I’ve listened to or read “The Hill We Climb” several times now, picking up new nuances each time. Amanda is twenty two years old. 22! As the not-kids seem quite happy to say: The Kids Are OK. 🎶
Mum (who works in healthcare) got her first (Pfizer) vaccine shot this week. Dad to follow within a few weeks, hopefully. I’ll feel much better when they’ve each had both doses. 💉
I’ve been working on a new feature for my Content Visibility plugin that integrates it into the new widgets screen. Widgets, in the Gutenberg world, are now blocks. We put those blocks in sidebars (or “widget areas”) like we have always done, but now we have access to the vast array of blocks that we have when editing content, too.
A widget area, such as one in the footer or header will exist on every URL on your site and widgets you put in such a widget area will, by default, show on every single URL. The new work – hopefully finished next week – allows you to decide where your widgets will show on your site.
For example, let’s say you have a widget area that outputs widgets between your main menu and your content area. You want to put a banner only on certain places on your site – such as when someone searches for something, or the 404 error screen, or on a date archive. The next version of Content Visibility will allow you to do that, by letting you choose the “special pages” upon which you wish your blocks to be shown. This only makes sense in the widgets screen, so that’s where it will appear. I’m really happy with the progress and potential of this. 🕶
I’ve learned of a couple new WordPress development tools this week. Kinsta, the hosting company, have released a tool similar to that of LocalWP. DevKinsta uses docker. LocalWP used to use docker, but switched to native tools. It’ll be really interesting to see which one of these provides the best end-user experience as well as the one that survives as-is. 🛠
The second is WordPressify from the folks at riangle, which is a build system that comes with basically everything you need to run a local environment. It’s an interesting take that is geared more to plugin and theme developers as opposed to folks who want a local version of their website. ⚒
Grommet is a component library (in React) that puts accessibility front-and-centre. The grommet team and contributors have put together a really nice collection of components that could act as a starting point for your own project’s component library/style guide. 🐶
Because I get most of my ideas from Jeremy Felt, I’ve been taking a look at the Webmention Plugin and thinking about how we can apply it in our teaching and learning tools at UBC. Student engagement through collaboration is proven to be successful, and I can’t help but think webmentions could play a part here. 💬
Dogsheep is a collection of tools for personal analytics. Know what other companies know about you. 🐩
BC COVID-19 Vaccine Count: 2.04% and 1.82% Canada-wide. 👩🏼⚕️
Pfizer is temporarily reducing the number of doses available to Canada (and other countries) in order to ramp up production. It makes sense in the long-term, but I can’t help but think that a delay of a week or more could prove to be very problematic to some seriously-at-risk folks. Must have been a hard decision to make at Pfizer.
