My Actifit Report Card: March 25 2021

I actually wrote a decent amount for my book on pacifism today! I’m hoping to have it finished by mid-year, which is a dangerous goal given my tendency to fail to finish projects. It’s not so much that I give up on them as find other things to take my time. I’ll quit a project or reimagine it from scratch when it becomes necessary, but there’s a lot of pieces that go into something like a book and the scale is large.

Of course, the book on pacifism is going to be short, maybe 15,000 or 20,000 words. It lays out my own beliefs and several arguments for them and applications of them, attempting to articulate my philosophy in such a way that I will preserve it beyond my death. I am one of very few living Tolstoyans, and even I am probably best defined as a neo-Tolstoyan to recognize the drift in context and culture that separates me from my forebears.

I also worked on my author website, particularly making some important preparations to change things in the future. I’m going to stop using a couple of the plugins I’m currently using and replace them with new plugins. The purpose of this is two-fold.

On one hand, the new system should be more future-proof, since the plugin I currently use doesn’t like the Gutenberg editor and requires my pages to be created in its own bespoke editor.

There’s also a problem where I just don’t like the design principles in the theme I’m using, and while I appreciated the design of the theme I’m using at first it hasn’t really grown on me. I could just change theme, but doing so either means using a theme set up to work with my plugin (which locks me in to use it in the future) or losing all the standard WordPress editor friendly content. There are some issues with how it handles blog rolls which have become more evident as I’ve gone from a dozen posts to well over sixty posts, and I don’t know that any system that uses this plugin would be better.

So I’m going to dedicate a few hours on Saturday to rebuilding the static pages from scratch in the new system, which offers similar features but works within the Gutenberg editor. This should be more convenient given that I use it in my other WordPress installs and I find it to be more simple to use for the majority of cases. Some of the fine-tuned control I enjoyed in the plugin I’ve been using is available in the default Gutenberg editor with a couple extra hoops to jump through, and it’s more stable to avoid breaking, say, when I load the page with the standard editor instead of the Gutenberg one and have to fix buttons that lost their color assignments.

I was hoping to start working on some written outline stuff for my novel I’m going to try to write in April. Fantasy zombies! I didn’t get to it today, but I’ll share a glimpse into the tentatively titled Aspects of Sand tomorrow.

This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io

Walking