Tips for Front-Pagers

Tips for Front-Pagers was last updated March 2023.

Technical Assistance

If something doesn’t appear to be working properly, doesn’t work as you expected, or you are trying something new and would appreciate some tips, I am available to walk you through the process.  You have my phone number from a previous email; if not, just shoot me an email.  ~WaterGirl

Tips & Reminders (Technical issues)

1. Are you looking for the MORE command to “show full post on front page“?  In classic mode, you’ll find it in the list of HTML commands that show up across the menu bar in text mode.  In block mode, if it’s not in the frequently used block types that show up by default (I think there are 9 of them) you can type “more” into the search field, and then select MORE when it comes up.
2. The MORE command to “show full post on front page” will not work properly if placed inside another element, such as a blockquote. Anne Laurie suggested a clever workaround for a blockquote: break your quoted text into two separate block quotes and then place MORE between the two blockquote elements.
3. You must use the text tab when you paste twitter embed code.  If preview shows the code itself rather than the actual embed, it’s most likely that you pasted the embed code while in visual mode.
4. Some video embeds can be tricky, but will often (though not always) work if they are within an iframe tag.
5. On the Road submissions start as private posts but can be changed from private and scheduled for publication so they no longer show up on the front page when you are logged in (until they are published).
6. Front pagers can add photos in a comment, from either Visual or Text mode. If you do it from Visual mode, you will see the photo itself before posting the comment. From Text mode, you see only the code before posting.  Click on the “Add Media” button at the top of the comment box. You’ll know what to do from there, I think, but please let me know if you need clarification.
7. Missed Schedule for post: even though you can set a post to be published at a particular time, they are not actually tied to the clock!   They have to be triggered by a page load at the time you have scheduled, so someone has to visit the website at your scheduled time.  So if you schedule a post to be published at 5 am, but no one visits your site at the time, then “cron job” that controls scheduled posts won’t activate and you’ll get WordPress missed schedule error.
8. For image size, the Media Library defaults to whatever image size was used last, so it’s a good idea to check for “medium” size when adding a featured image to a post, particularly if you are adding an image in a comment or if you don’t want the image to show up in gigantic form in John’s twitter feed.
9. To see the time a post is scheduled for:  Unless you know this trick, you may think you have to click to view, preview, or edit a post in order to see what time the post is scheduled for.  But you can see the scheduled time by hovering over the date. If you hover over the word “Scheduled” nothing happens.  And if you hover over the date itself, the scheduled time will show up, but there’s a 2-second lag before the time pops up.  So unless you know this trick, and you know that you have to wait the extra beat or two, you would think that you can’t see the time.
10. To see more items on the screen at once in WordPress, click on Screen Options in the upper right, under “Howdy”, and change Number of items per page to whatever you want.

Tips & Reminders (Balloon Juice Email & Group List)

1. The group email address is: [email protected]
2. Email to the list can only be sent from the email accounts that are on the list. Everyone is currently set up with both their balloon juice email address and their personal email address.  That means that you will receive 2 copies of each group email message until or unless you identify a single email address you plan to use when sending to the group list.

Helpful Suggestions From Front Pagers, to Consider

1. Anne Laurie suggests the addition of a visual cue to indicate when drafting a post that is gonna-be-awhile-yet, so others know it’s safe to publish their post without concerns about stepping on yours.  Her safe word is STOCKPILE.
2. Several people have suggested that before publishing a post, they always verify that a video does not autoplay.

List of People Who Are Banned

1. Lance Thruster
2. Brickley Paiste aka Kamala.Harris.2020
3. ola azul
4. TenguPhule
5. Daddio7
6. Amarythne RGB (sp)
7. Toldyouso

Recently Released from One-week Time Out

1. no one!