Sonant Thoughts - Episode 16: A Bit Meta
When starting a new project or venture you're never sure how well it's going to go. It can be a big surprise when things ramp up a lot quicker than you ever expected.
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# Concentrating on my own site has had a massive effect on my engagement (both reading and replies) at Medium. The reading side of that bothers me but I'm finding it hard to keep enthusiastic about Medium to the point of considering cancelling my membership.
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# Following on from the gap between status updates and long form posts I decided to look at my theme.
I had set it up to the hide titles of posts in the microblog category (if they had one) via CSS. It served its purpose and I didn't have to worry about syndication to Micro.blog because my microblog feed doesn't include the item title field.
But thinking about that middle area I realised that WordPress doesn't have a post format to cater for it.
There are various formats for specific circumstances (aside, link, quote, video, etc.) but nothing that sits between 'standard' and 'status' - presumably, everything that isn't a specific case is just considered a post. No matter what.
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So, what if I wanted to post something that was more than a status update (and, therefore, not going to be added to the microblog category) but didn't have a title for whatever reason?
The list of post formats is set by WordPress itself and your theme adds support for those it wants to use so setting up a custom post format doesn't appear to be an option.
It looks as though the only choice is to change up how the theme does things.
Instead of hiding the title using CSS it looks as though I would have to prevent the theme from creating it on the page for all status 'posts' and not add the longer ones to the microblog category.
In both content.php and content-single.php I have enclosed the post header with the below to not generate in on the page for the status post format:
...
This means I can display longer posts on the site without titles that won't get added to the microblog feed, but still doesn't solve the problems associated with distributing these middle-ground items.
Why bother?
As I replace empty post titles with the date & time for admin purposes, whether I add something meaningful or leave the title blank, they will still be treated as a normal long form post.
Let's face it, they still would even keeping a blank title but RSS readers would just duplicate the start of the post as the title so why bother?
It's more the principle than the purpose.
@colinwalker Colin, enjoy the format of your micro-cast. Fits nicely in the current trend towards owning your own content, regardless of whether it is short or long.
https://colinwalker.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Sonant-Thoughts-Episode-17-Whose-Problem-Is-It-Anyway.m4a
The issues with content distribution and display raise some fundamental questions about how we approach creation on our own sites, but whose problem is it? We can’t expect the various services to always treat our data as we would like despite the ideals of data portability. Links: Sonant Thoughts – Episode 16: A Bit Meta The Gap Between the Extremes Note: This was recorded early so doesn’t factor in thoughts from To syndicate or no
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<a href="https://colinwalker.blog/2017/05/10/sonant-thoughts-episode-17-whose-problem-is-it-anyway/">→ May 10th, 2017</a>