Various snippets have come my way over the last few days. But rather than writing new blog posts, I’ve been updating some older posts that touched upon them.
Much of this related to Juvenal. All my old posts on him can be found here.
One old post here contained the text, together with a very old and not very good translation of the ancient “biography” of Juvenal that appears in some manuscripts. I came across a modern translation by Courtney and added that to it, and also included screen shots of the page in two manuscripts.
Other posts referred to the Aarau fragments of Juvenal. A kind correspondent had let me know the location of these, so I made sure the posts reflected this.
Another post here contained the first two sentences of the first scholion on Satire I, line 1. I added the other two, to round it out. Small stuff, I know, but all useful.
Soon after publishing my post here on photographs of the Meta Sudans held by the American Academy in Rome, I learned that the British School in Rome had also posted some photographs of the monument online. So I added these to the same post. They nicely filled in some gaps, giving nearly 360° views of the Meta Sudans.
All this is rather inconsequential, and I would not mention it ordinarily, were it not for the next update.
This blog is written using the free WordPress software, although I host my own copy of it on some rented webspace. A couple of years ago WordPress decided to introduce a new editor, the “block editor”. This I ignored, as I was perfectly happy with the “classic editor”.
But the inevitable has happened. The classic editor is starting to rot. It is developing bugs. It’s becoming unfit for purpose.
So this is my first post with the block editor, written mainly to test it out. Let’s see what happens.
I have already discovered one problem: that it doesn’t seem to support footnotes. A blog post here gives a quite impractical approach, and suggests that WordPress simply don’t care about it. I’ll have to look further into this.[1]
I do believe that WordPress have lost the plot. The original purpose of WordPress was to make blogging easy. These days everything seems to be about using it to develop websites. Blogging hardly seems to rate a mention.
This is the problem with using any free blogging tools like WordPress, rather than raw HTML. It makes many things easier, and certainly improves the presentation. But at the end of the day it means committing your content to strangers who have no obligation towards you. They can in principle withdraw their tools from you at any moment for any reason, leaving you in the lurch. You have no redress whatever.
It’s all a long way from the internet of 1997!
- [1]Looks like it still works as it did!↩
I have been annoyed by the new block editor too. May I suggest writing your content in Markdown in a text editor and then copying the content into a Markdown block in WordPress? Markdown supports footnotes. Assuming you keep backups of your content, Markdown is editable with any text editor so you are not dependent on any particular piece of software.
I loathe the block editor as well, and use “Classic Editor” and “Disable Gutenberg” together. For footnotes, I use “Footnotation” by V.H. Belvadi
I’m not loving, I must say.
I don’t think that I want to write in markdown, but it’s a good suggestion. It reduces their power, at least.