Gutenberg On WordPress: Getting Used To Blogging With Blocks

Wordpress Gutenberg, the new “block-based” editing technology for all Worldpress blogs, self-hosted or not, doesn’t figure to go away anytime soon, so this blogger / vlogger reasoned that getting used to it was better than resisting it.  With that in mind, here is the first Zennie62Media blog post using Gutenberg.  So far, so good. The idea behind WordPress Gutenberg is to automatically orient your text and photos and video embeds in blocks.  You can then move the blocks around, and change their orientation in post.  Kinda like a screenwriter writing a script with Act 1, Act 2, and then Act 3, and then taking Act 3 and moving it to the position of Act 1, and then Act 1 becomes Act 2, and Act 2 is now Act 3.   Something like that.  If you want. Wordpress Gutenberg Is Blogging For Blockheads Bascially, WordPress Gutenberg makes you a blockhead.  So, WordPress Gutenberg is really blogging for blockheads. Wordpress Gutenberg Is Supposed To Make Non-coders Love WordPress One of the basic issues WordPress wanted to tackle by implementing WordPress Gutenberg was the idea that people use WordPress because they have to and not because they want to.   Well, as I’ve blogged before, I love WordPress the way it is.  And now I find myself getting steamed all over again – then I think of the note a man left on my first post about this where he said that I could flip back to the old way while using WordPress Gutenberg and anytime I wanted.  Alright, then! But Will WordPress Gutenberg Hurt My Blog’s Performance? Ok, but…. My concern right now is will WordPress Gutenberg make my blog load slower?  Will SEO be harmed?  Are there security holes the developers may have missed closing?  The one best way to get answers to two of the three issues is to use WordPress Gutenberg – and that’s what I’m doing. This is the end of this post – now the evaluation period is next.  I have to observe that the “preview” provision is awfully slow at generating a preview of your post.  I felt like I was aging a a clip of 1 year for every minute.  I stopped it.  Also, the overall “feel” of the post is clunky: the blocks seem to provide a tactile impediment to upward scrolling. Update: there’s a pink banner that reads “Uploading failed” – that’s not good.  Ah!  Now, I tried again, and it works.  I have to get the hang of the horizontal command bar at the top. Another update: Gutenberg is buggy and not ready for prime-time. The Twitter code I embedded was not accepted by the system which refused to allow me to post the edited content. And the black scrolling bar that is within the editor actually bled out of the editor, and looked like it was trying to leave the browser itself! I’ve seen enough. This is not ready, so I’ve deactivated WordPress Gutenberg. Hopefully, Wordoress will make sure it’s really ready before releasing an update. Stay tuned.