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All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of John and Amber’s discussion of this weeks plugins that have been reviewed.
WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #496 here.
Stick A Lime In It It’s Episode 496 – We have plugins for Duplication, Ideas, Twitter Spawn, Bacon, Popularity, Digital Downloads…, and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #496
John: Okay, ClassicPress. This is where I tried to talk about ClassicPress, but I haven’t had anything to talk about for several weeks now. And I brought it a couple of things here and there, and I still don’t have anything this week. I still haven’t made time to go research ClassicPress. I will eventually get around to it, but if you’re a ClassicPress user, and you’re listening to this show, remember, almost every plugin for WordPress still works in ClassicPress. And if you’ve got ClassicPress specific information, send it to us; we will get it out there for everyone to hear. I really want more people to know about ClassicPress. Okay, the WordPress plugins, first plugin out the gate — and what do I have for you? I have Top 10 – Popular post plugin for WordPress.
Amber: It’s actually called that — sorry.
John: Yes, it’s actually called that Top 10 – Popular post plugin for WordPress. It’s actually one I discovered while working on a client site as I was cleaning up all their old plugins — to clean it up and work, and I saw them and say, hey, that’s looks kind of familiar. How does it work? And it’s not a bad little plugin, and it’s something that you may or may not want or need on your site because, you know, the days of listing your top 10 posts are long since gone for the most part, but from time to time, it’s something you do want to showcase. And what it does, it comes with a couple of widgets that you can put on your site to display the top 10 most-read posts on your site, top 10 most popular posts. It also gives you some statistics in the backend to show you how much your posts are being read. I think that’s the most useful part of it is that gives you some statistics on what people like. And, of course, if you find out what people like, you can then retailer any new content to what people like so you can cater to them and keep them coming back for more. So not a bad plugin on the whole. Some you’ll want to go check out. It’s the Top 10 – Popular post plugin for WordPress, and I give it a four-dragon rating.
Amber: Need idea, actually.
John: Yeah, it’s been around for a long time.
Amber: That’s weird. I haven’t come across it, but I guess —
John: It’s no longer in Vogue. It used to be a major thing, you know, at the beginning of the development of WordPress, is when you build your website, you always created a spot to showcase your top posts, you know. And you always had that there so people could find them, and it was really popular for years, and then it fell out of Vogue with the new front page style designs. And it may make itself back into vogue. I mean, what’s old is always new again, you know, it’s constant recycling, you know. They reset the simulation as it is. I mean, we’re going back to worrying about things that we thought we had solved 20 years ago, so it all keeps coming around.
Amber: So the first one I’ve got is IdeaPush. IdeaPush isn’t really to push ideas out there so much as to get ideas to push towards you. This plugin is designed to get votes from your readers or listeners, get their input, ideas, feedback on whatever you are wanting, input, and feedback on. Once you activate this, the first step is to go to the settings on the left-hand side in a little main dashboard area and set it up the way you are wanting. You save it, copy the shortcode, go into pages, create a new page and enter the shortcode, and you have your IdeaPush Page Setup. There’s a lot to this plugin just for the free version, so I would recommend you go and check this out in order to get a better idea of all the different settings and ways you can set it up. It’s really quite an awesome little idea. I had to use the help video to help get me through every option out there but the help video was amazing. They didn’t move too fast. They actually taught clearly. It was great. It’s a really nifty plugin. There’s an upgrade so you can have multiple boards on your site, as well as a few other things that will be unlocked for you. The free version with just one board is great to start. It gets all the brain juices flowing. I read it at four-dragons.
John: Very nice. It does sound kind of an interesting thing. So it was designed to do is help you get feedback from your viewers to create new or better content for your site.
Amber: Yeah. And if you want to have an idea voted on, you can put it out there and have people thumbs up or thumbs down, or it’s got all kinds of different ways you can use this one.
John: Cool. All right. Well, the next one I’ve got, this seems to be a plugin that Yoast bought, sold, or got — took over somehow I don’t know. It’s the duplicate post plugin. At first, I thought it was a new duplicate post plugin from Yoast, till I started reading into it and about it and again. It’s another one I discovered when I was digging through a client site, doing some update work. And it’s just your usual one. They did have a couple of interesting features that I thought might be useful for it. And that is, you know, copy to new draft and have one here rewrite and republish, which I thought was a new one. And I didn’t give it a full test, but it seems like you — when you push that, it would create a new copy of it, and then put the other one into draft or draft form, and then, allow you to republish when you rewrite it. So it seemed like a really good idea. And having a plugin on your site for duplicating posts and pages is very important. You will find that out the longer you do your site because eventually, you’re going to be duplicating layouts or designs. This one here has a setting in it to help you set up and create templates to use, but unfortunately, I did find that there were some issues with this plugin along the way, and it seemed like the issues were wrapped around the fact when Yoast takes over something. And as most people know, listening to me, I’ve been doing away with the Yoast SEO plugin on all my sites for the last year moving over to rank math because it’s frankly much better.
And the other thing was is you get tired of seeing all the Yoast promotions and emails on it, and that seemed to be a major problem with this one even with comments, and one-star ratings over at the WordPress repository rating, such as annoying advertising does not sell especially when there’s no way to remove it. It shows up on every page of WP admin every time I log in. The only way to be rid of it is to be rid of the plugin itself — January 27 of this year since it has been acquired by Yoast, the plugin has been filled with Yoast advertising that is annoying and unnecessary. And it’s like I stopped using other Yoast plugins for the same reason also since the last update. It throws messages in the back-end and notifying of error during content cloning. So it’s not always the best thing here, you know. I thought it might be helpful and hopeful, but unfortunately, I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a long time. I give this plugin a two-dragon rating.
Amber: Yeah, Yoast is kind of going right down the hill, and they’re losing their clients left, right, and center right now.
John: Because they’re pushing their promotions too much and interfering, and they’re just basically annoying their users. You can annoy your users up to a certain point, but when you go overboard, they’ll just say, “fuck you,” and they’ll move on because there’s —
Amber: So the next one I have is Bacon Ipsum.
John: Bacon, Ipsum Bacon, oh —
Amber: Everybody seems to love bacon so much. I don’t really like bacon very much. I prefer sausage.
John: There’s something wrong with your brainpan.
Amber: No, bacon just doesn’t taste all that great at all. I don’t know why everyone loves it so much is basically —
John: It’s the whole thing. It’s the salt, man. That’s salty — and if you’re really good, smoke bacon, it’s that salty, smoky, savoriness.
Amber: Yeah. Oh, even though I don’t like bacon, Bacon Ipsum is actually pretty fun. It’s a total freebie. And once you activate it, you just — what it does is it creates a little widget for people who use Elementor or something like Elementor, and it creates a little — it creates a little button next to the Add Media button in the regular WordPress area when you’re doing your content, and you add it into the page, click either version one, two, or three, and that’s it. You get to generate a Bacon mockup of whatever page or post you’ve added it to. It’s a much more fun way to use dummy post words — very easy to use. There are over a dozen ways you can style this as well. So the mock-up will be more personalized when you click through it, and you just use a shortcode for it. They give you a whole list of shortcode to personalize it. It is so much fun. I ended up getting carried away and playing with it for like 45 minutes when I was checking this out. So I highly recommend you go check this out, loads of fun. I rate it five dragons.
John: Very cool. Well, I use Lorem Ipsum quite regularly when I’m mocking things up, and Bacon Ipsum just making it more entertaining. Alrighty. The last one I’ve got for you here today is Easy Digital Downloads. Now, if you haven’t heard of Easy Digital Downloads, you have not been around WordPress very long. It’s been around a very long time. It was made by Pippin and Pippin’s plugins. He sold it or transferred it on to somebody else who is still doing a very good job of development. It seems he’s still involved in it. I thought I saw his name in the list of developers, maybe Sandahl Development LLC. At any rate, this is a very good e-commerce store if you’re only selling digital products, be they PDFs, eBooks, packages; anything that is pure digital downloads. This is like the perfect e-commerce store. It’s very quick and easy to set up. It works well with multiple membership stores to allow membership-only stuff, and it’s just a very good plugin, and also integrates with almost all your common payment processors. It comes default with, of course, PayPal, which most everything does. It’s one that I’m setting up again. I haven’t set it up in a couple a few years now, but I’m doing it now on a new client project. We’re setting this one up, and I started going through it, and they’ve improved a lot since the last time I looked at it. It has a lot of nice settings in it as the one you’ll want to go check out. They do have a premium version of it, which is why currently I’m going to have to limit its rating to four dragons, but go check it out. It’s Easy Digital Downloads, simple e-commerce selling for digital files.
Amber: Long name. So Hemdian asked about Bacon Ipsum looking old?
John: Oh, well. Yeah, that’s it. They haven’t updated in a while. Let’s pop that back for a second. Yeah, they haven’t tested over the last three major — it hasn’t been updated for two years, but that doesn’t mean the plugin is no good. It’s still surprisingly installed by fewer than 10 websites. So the guy who’s developing it may be discouraged, and there may be no problems with it at all. If it works, it works, you know. There may be no security issues. It depends on what it goes through. I don’t automatically discount a plugin just because it’s old, you know. I’ve run plugins on my site that I have plugins on one or two of my sites that are like four, and five, and six years old, and haven’t been updated in three or four more years, but they’re still security securely sound because they were built well when they were built, and they work with the latest PHP and everything else. So it’s really hard to know exactly what to think when you see those warnings. These are just warnings for folks to let you know that it may have issues. It doesn’t mean it’s going to, so take it with a grain of salt, test it on a development site or your sandbox for your live site to see how it’s going to work before you put it on your live site. Or if you need it fixed up, I know a good developer who can be sent to go through it or reach out to the developer themselves. Sometimes someone reaching out and offering to pay them to update their plugin will get them to do something. I mean, money is a great motivator for people.
Amber: It definitely is so. So the last one I’ve got is Matilda. I think it’s just Mathilda.
John: Mathilda, Mathilda. It reminds us of a movie like that or something. Isn’t there a Mathilda movie?
Amber: Yes, but there’s no ‘H’ in her name. I love that movie growing up.
John: All right. So what do we got here with Mathilda?
Amber: Mathilda is a tweeting thing. If you’re big into tweeting, this is a great little freebie. This plugin imports all of your tweets refreshing every 15 minutes. It only pulls your tweets, not the entire conversations, and it will also pull mentions, and it is keeping up with the new 260 characters setting, which I didn’t even know that — was the thing. You can personalize it pretty well, and it’ll bring in mentions and add any like links or stuff it will bring those in. But when it first brings in the link, it won’t work. You have to wait for it to refresh in the next 15 minutes before the links will work, which is a little strange, but — and when I was setting it up, I found it hard to set up. It might be easier for someone who’s more accustomed to Twitter, like maybe knowing about Twitter means, you know, what an OAuth Access Token and consumer key and stuff is. I know what a consumer key is, but I had to look a lot of the stuff up that you have to fill in to set this up. And there’s no real help button that I could find within the plugin. And the information on the WordPress site where you are right now, just kind of gives a gist of what the plugin does. The lack of the Help button brought it down a point, but if you do a lot of tweeting, you don’t mind a bit of a learning curve to set this up. I do recommend you go and check this out because I could see it being very useful for people who are major Twitters. I rate it four dragons.
John: There we go. Yes, anyone who sets up after a while, I’ll know what the OAuth Token is. It’s the authorization token, and what it is, is you have to set up an app over at Twitter. I can’t remember what it’s called, and you get the Access Token Secret. You get those things by setting up your application over at Twitter through Twitter’s developer tools and such, what it does, allows you to API access into Twitter to download your Twitter feed. Now, the one good thing, this could be is if you are as you said, an avid Twitter person who sends out lots of tweets to archive your stuff, but if you’re also a Twitter person who puts out stuff that puts you in the process of being canceled by Twitter, you might want to have an archive of all your tweets, so you could actually archive all your tweets on your website this way, so something to think about there. That was the first thing I thought of is to use that as an archive. Why am I hearing that is so weird. It sounds like I’m hearing Morse code in my ears for some reason.
Amber: Hmm, I wonder what those old Morse code machines interfere with modern-day electronics at all someone’s nearby.
John: I highly doubt it.
Amber: Because radios can interfere with electronics sometimes.
John: Yeah, it’s always possible. Somebody else could be sending out a Morse code SOS or something that is being picked up by my thing. There’s another scam call.
Amber: Oh, that’s what you heard. You heard that every time that your phone is anywhere near your headphones or even your speakers, you’ll hear like a Morse code a little bit before your phone rings.
John: Oh, it’s the tracking hay for tracking. All right. Well, that’s all the plugins we’ve got for you. And this show is still brought to you by
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John: Absolutely nothing, but the best. All right. And listener feedback, we don’t have enough yet here, but it’d be nice. We eventually do have enough content here, and we have a jingle for it, but listener feedback. We have some lovely stuff this week. It seems I’ve managed to fly right over the zone and attracted some flak. Here we go. I’m a developer who enjoys hearing conversations about WordPress plugins, et cetera. I’ve lost three friends to COVID, and I don’t need your uninformed opinion about it, or Joe Biden, or anything else. I’ve even grown tired of your snide comments about WordPress, its creator, the coming demise of Gutenberg not going to happen — yeah, unfortunately, and so on. You come off sounding like a bitter jerk, Gary. Well, thanks, Gary. I really appreciate that some great feedback.
Amber: You could do kind of sound like a jerk. You’re not quite bitter yet.
John: Yeah, well, give me a few more years, but yeah, so I come off as a jerk. Well, so be it. I am working on my tone of voice, you know. It’s all in the tone of voice whether you come off as a jerk or a nice guy when you’re being snide, you know, and I just haven’t got that down yet, but you know, I do want to say a couple of quick things to this anyway. First off, well, I’m really sorry, you’ve lost friends to COVID. It’s unfortunate. You must be in an area that is going against the norms for this statistic, you’re in a statistical anomalous area. If you actually had three friends die, that’s a major statistical anomaly, and in this whole virus, and it does suck. And, you know, my condolences for you, not that you’re going to hear it because I think you’ve left us already. As to uninformed opinion, how do you know it’s uninformed? You know, I actually think it’s quite informed. I read a lot. I research a lot, so I’d say it’s rather informed — and well, I’m not even going to say anything about Biden, you know. I went through the process of watching my father suffer and die from dementia, and I know the early signs when I see it.
Amber: Unfortunately, yeah.
John: Unfortunately, I know it very well. I lived it for 10 years, you know, and my snide comments about WordPress, those are never going away. I mean, after all, they banned me from the forums simply for trying to share this show in the forums. And if you want to see that whole saga, all the emails back and forth, it’s over at wppluginsatoz.com. Just search band and you will find the entire saga, all the emails back and forth between me and their forum operators. So you find that out, and its creator Matt, while being a very intelligent guy, has already stated to the world that he is the benevolent dictator for WordPress. This is not conjecture. This is the actual fact that he has stated that, so he has set himself up for all snide comments just by stating the fact that he’s a dictator. Benevolent or not, there’s no such thing as a benevolent dictator. Maybe, in the beginning, they’re benevolent, but as they gain more power, that benevolence disappears — and Gutenberg, yeah, you’re right. It’s never going to go away, but that’s not going to stop me from saying snide comments about it. So, at any rate, thanks, Gary. I really appreciate it. Send us more stuff. If you’re still listening, I will be more than happy to read out any additional comments or emails you’ve got, and anyone else out there that wants to come after me, bring it — people bring it, I’m more than happy to take it on.
Amber: For entertaining Showtime.
John: Well, it does. It adds some entertainment to it. And, you know, it’d be even nicer if those of you that liked the show, send us some good stuff, you know if you like what we’re doing. Let us know — but this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten emails like this. It’s been a couple of three years. I think it’s been about three or four years since I’ve gotten an email like this. It’s been a long time since I’ve really managed to piss somebody off. It’s not like I haven’t been trying. Alrighty then, let’s move it along and have some fun.
John: So a big thank you to Steve Goodtime and Brent Matthews for that one really. I greatly appreciate that. Alright, it is contest time. We do have a contest going. And please, folks, go enter these contests, come on. We go through a lot of effort to get this. Well, Charlie goes through a lot of effort. Thank you, Charlie. He’s going through a lot of effort, and it’s really nice. Even if you’re not interested in the plugin, just go into the contest, you’re only going to get on the email list once, you know. It’s not like you’ve entered a contest and we add you to the email list five times unless you’re using five different email addresses. No, if you use the same email, you only get entered on the email list once, and we don’t spam you. We send out a newsletter once a week, you know, maybe with some time. We might have something else important to say, and we’ll send out that but we’ll never send you email after email trying to sell you stuff. But please support the contest, spread the word, tell people, “Hey, this is a great way to win a free license,” and these aren’t chintzy licenses. These aren’t one year six months. A lot of these are lifetime licenses. These are premium lifetime licenses. They’re worth sometimes hundreds of dollars, so make sure you go enter these contests.
All right. Now, we did have a winner from our last contest, the ultimate lifetime license for WP Admin Pages. The winner was Brian Holder. Congratulations, Brian. He even reached out to us, and he’s gotten all his info. So thanks a lot, Brian, for participating in the contest. Make sure you tell everyone about the contest and keep entering the contest week after week. Okay, this week, what do we get? We’ve got an unlimited lifetime license for HappyFiles over at happyfiles.io. This is so you can create and manage unlimited folders for your media folders. And you create these folders, manage it, organize your media files, media files into different folders, makes it easier to search and correlate them, know what they’re for. Really great plugin. What we’re giving away is an unlimited lifetime license valued at $59. Really great plugin. Make sure you go check it out. We’ve also got some YouTube video about how it goes here on the site, and I also reviewed this plugin back in Episode 463. So make sure you go check that out and find out what I had to say about that plugin back there. So please make sure you get out there and share this out with folks and go into the contest, and any developers out there that would like to support the show, you can donate premium licenses at the wppluginsatoz.com/plugin contest.
Amber: I was just going to say it’s definitely a really useful sounding license for a plugin like, wow, I could use that.
John: Well, it’s a pretty cool plugin. I think I gave it a really good rating. I don’t remember, you know, it’s like as soon as I’ve done one, I flush it from my memory. I put so much data in my head, if I don’t flush it regularly, it gets clogged HappyFiles. I gave it a four-dragon rating. So it’s a pretty decent rating, a very decent plugin. So before we move along into the Q&A segment, we got a couple of quick things to close out the show on it. And first off, the plugins I covered in this episode are Top 10 – Popular Posts Plugin for WordPress, which I gave a four to. Yoast Duplicator Post, which I gave a two to, and The Easy Digital Downloads Simple Ecommerce for selling digital files, I gave a four to.
Amber: I have a commercial running through my head; long name, amazing results.
John: That’s what I was looking for. My brain didn’t go there; long-name amazing results.
Amber: Got to love commercials.
John: Only the good ones stick in your head. It’s like jingles.
Amber: So plugins that I covered was IdeaPush, which I gave a four to. Bacon Ipsum, which I gave a five to, and Mathilda, which I gave a four to.
John: And a couple of quick reminders here. Yeah, if you want to deal with Matt’s famous quotes, we got a link here to Matt’s famous quotes. And, you know – and, of course, the one in there is — it’s right there at the top. I believe he feels like a non-elected benevolent dictator, his responsibility to remit to me as many users as possible and direct the software project in a way that reflects their interests. You know, what the things he’s done in the last few years were not what the majority of the people wanted. And that was well-demonstrated by the people, but he went ahead with him anyway. That’s a dictator. No matter how you describe it, that’s a dictator. So, at any rate, there’s still no meetups, but I am contemplating a meetup probably, and I would reckon is going to be June, and it’s going to be a combo meetup for WP plugins. I know agenda meetup and a tavern meetup, all in one, and it’ll probably be held at the Oasis, because the Oasis will be mostly complete, and a new deck will be usable by then. So that is coming down the pike, and I’m guessing it’s going to be June, and maybe by that time, there are dictators that we’ve elected into offices that will have removed these ridiculous things on us that prevent us from having these meetups without breaking their new laws. All right. And as I say — well, as we’ve mentioned a couple of times, you don’t get enough of us. You can join Amber and I on our new podcast over at the Rogues Tavern shooting — this shit at the Rogues tavern. It’s every Tuesday evening, 9 pm live. And then, I upload it to the website or day or two later. I was supposed to do it yesterday, but I think I forgot. If you want to be in an interview show, simply contact wppluginsatoz.com/interview. That’s all we have there. I say we move on and —
It’s question and answer time with Amber.
Amber: Okay, just as per usual, if anyone out there has any questions they’d like me to ask on their behalf, send them into me at amber@wppro.ca. Hemdian says June, so long the wait.
John: It’s the place right now I’m limited by, you know. I’m limited by massive restrictions everywhere, and I hate masks. So I don’t go anywhere really because they force me to wear a mask.
Amber: I have an awesome mask, but, you know, I just I can’t handle being on for so long. I get dizzy.
John: I can’t handle it at all. I start to feel claustrophobic. So, at any rate, let’s move along with the question-answer.
Amber: First question, what is it that causes plugins to clash and not work? For instance, you have one working plugin, you upload another, and then, suddenly neither work?
John: Okay, well, that’s a multifaceted issue but most commonly, what the problem is, is that each plugin is looking for the same resources. They’re trying to use the same things at the same time, and they crash, you know, or they’re putting out like many plugins will also have their own Java enum, or jQuery enum, and another plugin may have the same jQuery and it tries to fire that jQuery at the same time. It’s a conflict of the code and they’re not following. It’s the developers not following the best practices of using all their resources, pulling all the resources they can from the WordPress core. And only using their plugin what they absolutely have to use. But many developers, you know, freethinkers, they want to do it their way. So they do it their way, which is fine and dandy until you run into two plugins that just don’t want to play well together. It’s a conflict of code, is what it boils down to. And unless you’re a developer, figuring out what’s causing that conflict is hard. It’s like I can sometimes do it, but most of the time, I have to bring in a developer who understands the code and has the diagnostic tools to track each code firing when the page is loading. So we can see what’s breaking when — so it’s a complex mess. And basically, whenever I have that happen, I determine which plugin is the most important one, and then, I find another plugin that does the same job as the one that’s not working, not playing well with others. And I use a different plugin.
Amber: It’s interesting is, when I had that happened to me, it was the first shortcode plugin that I uploaded that caused an issue. So I found a different one, and that one caused the same issue. Two completely different plugins that just did the same thing.
John: So, it sounds like there’s a problem with the theme. Theme kicking out code too because you got to remember, you’ve got three areas here going — competing with each other. You got the WordPress core files, then the theme brings into its own files and functionalities. And then, the plugins bring in their own files and functionality. And the one that matters the most, of course, is the WordPress core files because you need the core files for all the basic functionality and the theme may work well with the core files, but it may be putting out something that some other plugin is trying to do a similar function, and they run into each other. So, one way to find out whether if it’s a dev site, load in another theme and see if the plugins work. If they work, then you know, it’s the theme that was loaded.
Amber: Hemdian mentioned here, I’ve had a block add-on use the same CSS classes as another block add-on overriding and breaking them.
John: Oh, man, what a nightmare that must have been.
Amber: Yeah. Same CSS classes mean the same name, not actually same CSS?
John: Yes. And that means they’re competing when it’s rendering. It’s competing, like, which one do I use? What do you mean? I got two choices, boss? Which one? Yeah, that would be just a nightmare and a half. Most developers are pretty good about creating unique CSS classes. It’s like having a username on a platform. There can be only one name of that type in your particular area — and the same with CSS, and the same with even function names. Function names that are written for custom functions, they can be only one unique name. If you get the same name and they conflict, that’s another problem that can occur.
Amber: Yes, very multifaceted issue, some that have to like really do some time learning about.
John: Yeah, I imagine. Yeah, I bet that sucked. Well, hopefully, got it sorted out. All right. What’s the next question?
Amber: Yeah, it sucked as you said. Why is it not a good idea to change up the position of pictures and textbooks on a site that you were building through the padding and whatnot in the settings? What does that do to the page or post’s ability to transfer between PC, tablet, and mobile?
John: Okay, this one here is another sort of issue that comes along when you’re using the paddings and other things. The paddings are set relative generally to the edge of the block that they’re contained in, and that block may be set relative to the edge of the page or the pixel dimensions. Like, if you can look at your page, the way the rendering looks at it, it sees everything as a grid, and it sees lines, and it sees — and it lines up things to block edges, and to the top of the page, or the bottom of the page, or to the left, or to the right of the page. When you start using paddings, you’re telling that image, to say, the 10 pixels to the right of the left, 10 pixels over to the right of the edge of the block. Well, what happens is, even you can make it look really pretty on a computer monitor, which is a big screen 1900 by whatever, and it looks really pretty. But when you come down to mobile, and you hit 1200 pixels wide, well, now that block is still 10 pixels over because you told it to stay 10 pixels over. So, it’s going to stay 10 pixels over, but 10 pixels starts to really show itself when you get down to the mobile versions. You don’t see 10 pixels when you got 1900 to choose from, but you do see 10 pixels when you only have 700 to choose from.
Okay, you got to remember the — computer’s everything is done in pixels. It’s all in pixels width, and I can’t remember. I think a mobile phone is like 500 pixels wide. Ten pixels on 500 is a pretty good chunk. It actually becomes noticeable. So, when you do — is that it actually breaks and shoves your alignment off to the side a little bit, and it looks funny in mobile versus when you start bringing it up into larger sizes. And that’s one of the problems of using padding to do things you want to find other ways to line things up. Padding works, but not always. And it sometimes works on mobile, but not always. It’s kind of a guessing game at times I’ve found. It’s like you set it up and you work it out. One of the better things that’s, unfortunately, needs to be done today is you have to build more for your mobile than you do for desktop because over 60 percent of traffic to websites comes from mobile phones — and we’re not talking mobile tablets. We’re talking mobile phones. You know, the majority comes from phones because everybody and their brother have a mobile phone in their ass pocket, and that’s the first thing they reach for when they go to the Internet is their — reach for their phone. So that’s pretty much it on that one there.
Amber: Okay, well, it does make a lot of sense. I noticed now, like, just since I started working on this, I’ve noticed that you have more ability. Now, when you get down to the mobile, you get to change it around — doesn’t actually affect anything else?
John: Yep.
Amber: That’s a really neat thing.
John: That’s a good thing. All right. You got one more question. We’ll let you read out the question, then we’ll split it right there and run off into the YouTube version for everyone.
Amber: All right. When you have a plugin that brings for content from other sources like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, do they store it somewhere separate? Or are they just pulling it forward? If you were to suddenly be blocked and removed from one of those platforms, would you then lose everything that you had brought forward through the plugin — lose all your content?
John: That is a very interesting question to ask. All right. And we will be back after the exit credits here and answer that question. So, if you’re listening on the podcast, you’ll want to go to the YouTube to get the answer to that question. So I’ll let my girl take us out of here and enjoy my shot.
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John can be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.
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