Dan York

As I wrote about last year, the HTML5 “details” element is a very useful and lightweight way to create a collapsed list of questions or other content. Investigating possible options, these kind of parts of a web page seem to be often called an “accordion”. There are a number of accordion plugins, but almost all the ones I could find use some kind of additional JavaScript scripts to make the accordion.

Now, obviously I would need to style it a bit more to have it fit in here well, but it’s very easy to add in Gutenberg. It also has the ability to be added in the Classic Editor, too.

What??? With schools moving to online learning, are we really seeing the end of *snow days*? In this episode, I talk about the long tradition of "snow days" in the northern US, and how the COVID-19 pandemic is changing the way we learn... and removing the need to have a day off for snowstorms! If you are in areas with snow, are you hearing something similar? (no snow days) What do you think about all of this?

In this pandemic with its ongoing and never-ending uncertainty, is part of our challenge that we have depleted our brain's "surge capacity"? Following on to the last episode 396 where I talked about the "Pandemic Productivity Plunge," in this episode I discuss an article I found very helpful in thinking about how to *think about* our response to the pandemic. The article is "Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful" by science journalist Tara Haelle. I would encourage everyone to read it at: https://elemental.medium.com/your-surge-capacity-is-depleted-it-s-why-you-feel-awful-de285d542f4c (If you cannot view it there, I have also found it at https://outline.com/GwHDSf ) What do you think about this article and the ideas? Are they helpful to you? What are YOU doing to renew your capacity to respond? Please do leave comments either here on SoundCloud or wherever this is posted on social media. FYI, you can follow the article author on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tarahaelle

If you are interested in presenting at the ICANN 69 DNSSEC and Security Workshop during the week of 17-22 October 2020, please send a brief (1-2 sentence) description of your proposed presentation to dnssec-hamburg@isoc.org by 27 August 2020. We are open to a wide range of topics related to DNS, DNSSEC, DANE, routing security, and more. There are some ideas in the Call for Participation below, but other ideas are definitely welcome, too! More...

More...

If you are interested in presenting at the ICANN 69 DNSSEC and Security Workshop during the week of 17-22 October 2020, please send a brief (1-2 sentence) description of your proposed presentation to dnssec-hamburg@isoc.org by 27 August 2020. We are open to a wide range of topics related to DNS, DNSSEC, DANE, routing security, and more. There are some ideas in the Call for Participation below, but other ideas are definitely welcome, too! More...

Here I am just inserting a “block pattern” in WordPress 5.5 that has two buttons side by side:

The point of a “block pattern” is it lets you insert a pre-defined and pre-configured set of blocks. You then can edit those blocks and set them up with their unique properties.

This is VERY different from “re-usable blocks”, which can also be inserted easily in different parts of your site… but they all share the same value. So you could have, say, your contact info or number of members in a re-usable block. Insert that block all across your site. Update it in one location, and it is updated everywhere.

Instead a “block pattern” is more of a “template”… “here are some blocks to get you going on this page and now you can do with them what you will.“

I can see a HUGE use case for this in the pages we create at my employer. We often create new landing pages or event pages where we use some standard patterns. Obviously we can just “duplicate” an existing page if it is a close match, but often we are building new pages where we also want to bring in elements used on another page. Now, we have built our own blocks for some of our common elements. But a “block pattern” allows us to have a group of blocks that we can easily add to the page.

The challenge is that adding block patterns in WordPress 5.5 primarily involves adding code to your theme or creating a custom plugin.

However, I see there is now a “Block Pattern Builder” plugin that needs some investigation…

So... anyone else struggling a bit with productivity during these pandemic times? In this episode I talk about some of my own struggles with productivity during the pandemic, as well as some of what people share in threads on Twitter - https://twitter.com/danyork/status/1290287978024116227 and Mastodon - https://mastodon.social/@danyork/104626127875193156

This post is to test the lazy loading of iFrames, as noted in this blog post from David Walsh.

I’m first going to just embed a video without the lazy loading:

To make this work, I’m using a HTML block in the WordPress editor so that I can put in the exact iframe copied from YouTube.

Next I’m going to run a couple of speed tests on this published post.

Then, I’ll come back and add ‘loading=”lazy”‘ into the iFrame code and repeat the tests. Let’s see what we learn!