The Writing Life of a Tadpole

Articles I Like: The Waves Of COVID-19 Insurance Claims

May 20 2020

Since I once loved the law enough to do my first year of law school, there are occasionally articles that attract my interest that most people would skip over. One I saw this past week on Above The Law was about insurance claims in the wake of Covid-19. The author noted that the topic isn’t interesting to everyone, but a factoid at the beginning caught my attention:

But I heard something interesting about insurance last week that I just had to share with you: Some European insurance companies are now seeing fewer automobile insurance claims than at any time since World War II. (On second thought, maybe my definition of “interesting” and yours don’t match up precisely.) That gives you an idea of what the pandemic has done to travel across a big swath of the world.

The Waves Of COVID-19 Insurance Claims | Above the Law

But the rest of his article is pretty interesting too, as he noted what he sees as three likely waves of insurance claims:

Travel — in the OP, it argues this one has already passed with people filing claims related to cancelled trips, etc.

» Read the rest

I don’t want a group/container block in WordPress

May 18 2020

The default blocks in Gutenberg blocks includes a “group” block. Atomic Blocks, Qodeblock and Stackable added their own called “container”. The point of these “parent” blocks is to add a container around a bunch of nested blocks within it. Suppose, for example, you have four blocks that always go together — a header, a paragraph of text, an image, and some links. You could put those four inside a block, and then if you want to move them around a page, you just move the big container block, and all of those sub-blocks / child blocks will move at once. They stay together. Alternatively, where it becomes really useful is if you put the four child blocks in a reusable group block, say for example instructions on how to do something that you frequently refer to in your posts, and you can dump that block in anytime you need it.

While that can also start to make a site look repetitive in a blogging world, one area where it could be useful in my site is the close-out of a book review. » Read the rest

The blocks I use in WordPress

May 18 2020

I have been reviewing blocks from different block collections and plugins (default blocks, JetPack, Advanced Gutenberg, Atomic Blocks, Kadence, Qodeblock, Stackable, and Ultimate Addons) and choosing the ones I like while deactivating the rest. It’s weird doing the reviews as normally you would say “Here’s block X and Y” and compare the visual features in the post as well as some of the back-end options.

Except that once I deactivate block X because I liked block Y better, block X disappears from the display. In WordPress, there is something called graceful degradation for plugins which is the idea that if I use a plugin to insert an image, for example, with custom styling and then later remove the plugin, the page should still load perfectly fine.

But blocks do NOT degrade gracefully; it is an on/off switch. Once I finish the review post and deactivate the ones I don’t like, the post won’t display properly except for the blocks I kept activated. » Read the rest

The three page-divider blocks that I use in WordPress

May 17 2020

I’m considering a bunch of different blocks across eight collections (default ones, JetPack, Advanced Gutenberg, Atomic Blocks, Kadence, Qodeblock, Stackable, and Ultimate Addons) and next on my list are the spacer / divider / separator blocks. These are blocks that allow you a visible or invisible gap between two blocks. It could be a horizontal line, or just extra white space, but something that separates two other blocks visually.

The default collection has nothing but I found six different ones in four other collections.

First up is Kadence, with a combination spacer/divider. It starts with the assumption I want a solid horizontal line as my divider and the block allows me to specify the height of the spacer (different heights for desktop, tablet and phone), whether there is a line or not, whether any line is solid / dashed / dotted / striped, its colour, and its width. Pretty functional, with the only limitation really being that the only choice is a line. » Read the rest

Feature blocks, quote blocks and product pricing blocks, oh my!

May 17 2020

The next area in my review of block options is pretty huge. There are 25 different types of blocks to handle some sort of “highlight” feature — quotes, blockquotes, testimonials, author boxes, team boxes, etc. Some have photos in them, some are just text, but every one of the eight WordPress collections (default Gutenberg, JetPack, Advanced Gutenberg, Atomic Blocks, Kadence, Qodeblock, Stackable, and Ultimate Addons) has some form of these blocks.

I generally have two specific needs I’m trying to fill. First, I do put up quotes as individual posts. What I would LOVE is some way to have a set of 100 photos ready to go as backgrounds, merge one with the quote of the moment that I’m adding, and have it be both indexed as text and shareable as an image/meme. I don’t think that is even possible, so what I’m really looking for is an easy way to post an image and to include text over top of it. » Read the rest