Category: Wordpress

the blog is advertising free, again

whbeebe2 Comments

I don’t like spending any money unless I feel it’s absolutely necessary, especially on the blog. I get queries for WordPress plugins and SEO “guidance”, all of which ask for money. I normally lump WordPress plans into that same category of not worth spending money on, until one day I looked at my site without having logged in, and discovered this:
This is a screen capture off of my iPad using Safari. It’s not the Best Buy TV deal that bothers me, but the fake wellness advertisement underneath. The second is one of the milder ones. Over a short period of time I spotted ads for toe fungus, anti-wrinkle cures, male impotence, and so much more. If the ads were limited to simply hawking tech or cars or some other “regular” item I wouldn’t object (not much). But it’s not. WordPress is allowing truly questionable, morally reprehensible, if not right on the edge of illegal, snake oil ads to appear on my site. So this morning I pulled out the credit card and paid for two years of WordPress’ Personal Plan. It’s more than I really wanted to spend, but I at least saved a few bucks with two years instead of just one.

I refuse to put up with these ads, and I’ll be damned if I subject my readership to them.

This isn’t the first time I’ve paid for a Personal Plan. I had a Personal Plan on the site almost from the beginning. In 2018 I stepped up to their Business Plan, in part because I wanted to see what the advantages might be, in part because I thought I could use this site to anchor work in retirement, and in part because they pro-rated the cost by subtracting what I’d already paid for my Personal Plan at the time. WordPress even knocked an additional $100 off the top of the Business Plan. Such a deal! In the end I didn’t renew the plan because the next year would have cost me $300, and that was way over my threshold. I’d also discovered my dreams of financial independence via the blog were delusional. As of mid-2019 I wasn’t on any plan and the ads came back. I wasn’t paying attention to how bad the WordPress ads were until recently, when in a short span of time I discovered how truly awful they were.

Along with the plan I also picked up yet another domain. This little blog now has four domains, the original WordPress domain (radarwitch.com) as well as these:

  • arcanesciencelab.com
  • arcanesciencelab.org
  • arcanesciencelab.net

I’ve been collecting them slowly over the years, with the .org domain name coming with this latest Personal Plan subscription. Two of them are paid for by the plan, the other two are $18/year. These are all the “old school” domains (.com, .org, and .net) and are usually the targets of squatters, not that anybody would ever find my little blog so important and thus so valuable that they’d want to squat there, but still. Better safe than sorry, especially for any visitors.

My writing is bad enough. No need to further antagonize you with shit advertising. You’re welcome.

my evolving use of the ipad with ulysses for writing

whbeebe

Something interesting is happening at the start of retirement; I’m using my iPads more than my iPhone.

Before I retired my iPhone was my primary iDevice, my iPad of choice if you will for reading the news as well as being a general communication device. It was a compact general purpose device that went with me everywhere I traveled requiring far less space than any iPad. I easily fell into the habit of using it equally at home as well as work. My poor old iPads languished, sitting on my nightstand most of the time, constantly connected to their chargers, only coming out when I needed a larger surface to view specific content or work with my photography. No matter how hard I tried to be more balanced in using all the portable devices, my iPhone became the go-to device everywhere.

Now that I’m home I’m it’s reversed. Now my iPhone sits on the charger a lot more while I work with the iPads, especially the big 12.9” second generation. It has become my primary writing tool, combined with Ulysses and the logi Slim Combo cover and keyboard. You’d think I would use my MacBook Pro, but I’ve discovered that the logi keyboard is far easier to type on for long periods of time because it lies flat on the table. Unlike the edge of the MacBook, there is no vertical rise due to the thickness of the computing machine the keyboard is attached to. It makes for a highly relaxing and highly effective writing experience. The MacBook isn’t abandoned as it were, as it continues to be used for tasks for which it is well suited, such as software development and running my various virtual machines.

I have two iPad Pros, a 9.7” first generation and a 12.9” second generation. They were both purchased on heavy discount (50% or more markdown, around Christmas season) after the follow-on generations were released. Newly released Pros are just too expensive. While they are both quite different size-wise, they share many common features, such as the OS at the same version, the use of the Lightening port for charging, a push button on the front, and the 3.5mm headphone jack on the edge. For me it’s worth hanging back a few generations not just on price alone, but to keep the front pushbutton and headphone jack. Quite frankly, considering the power of Apple’s silicon processors (A9x for the 9.5” and A10x for the 12.9”) I don’t feel either one is too slow for what I need. “Trailing edge” suits me just fine.

In the early days before the 12.9” iPad Pro arrived, I was focused on writing with the 9.7”. It had for some time another smaller logi cover and keyboard combo to cover it. But I dropped the 9.7” iPad one time too many on an edge and eventually knocked loose several keyboard keys on one corner, which effectively ended it’s practical typing usefulness. Rather than replace the keyboard with another expensive cover, I purchased a basic incase cover and I now use the 9.7” more for reading, drawing, photo post processing and viewing, and very light typing. It makes an almost ideal reading device for technical books. I’ve also discovered that with Ulysses installed on the 9.7” and using iCloud to save and sync between the devices, I can sit back and read what I’ve written, which believe it or not helps with light editing and corrections. I catch problems on the 9.7” iPad that I seemingly miss on the larger one.

Some Observations Working with Ulysses

As good as using Ulysses on an iPad is (and it really is quite good), there are still some issues with this tool combination:

  • Ulysses has a tendency to correct misspellings such that the correct word is the wrong word, such as correcting word as work. If I don’t catch them when I first make them, then they slip through and wind up being published on my blog. That forces me to go in via the WordPress web editor and make corrections. Which leads me to my second issue and biggest gripe.
  • I can make corrections in Ulysses and push them up to the blog. Unfortunately every time I’ve tried I wind up creating more than one post, which forces me to immediately go in and delete the older version.

That’s rather annoying. I’m left with the choice of either fixing the mistakes directly in the blog, thus forcing the original Ulysses writing to not be in sync with the blog, or else fix it in Ulysses and clean up the earlier duplicate posts. For the time being I’ll live with fixing my mistakes as I find them within WordPress.

Perhaps one day there’ll be a better way to correct and sync those corrections between Ulysses and WordPress. In the mean time the work-around is easy; slow down and be a lot more careful in writing and correcting before pushing out a post. The benefits of this system of writing I’m using far, far outweigh any perceived deficiencies.