That’s a problem I’ve heard about on the Wordpress versions of these posts but that’s the first I’ve heard of it happening on LW. It’s been especially bad this week from all reports.
What’s happening is this:
I write the post in Google, using Snipping Tool or Copy Image to grab the images and pasting them into a Google Doc.
I copy/paste the Google Doc into Wordpress. I used to edit directly in Wordpress but their new ‘blocks’ editor is unusably bad unless someone explains why it isn’t. Seriously, wow, it’s bad.
I post to Wordpress.
Post gets copied over to LessWrong from Wordpress.
My current understanding is that this causes the images to remain hosted by Google (and GWS’s comment suggests this is also true of the LW version), and as popularity of the posts has gone up over time, I’m running into rate-limit issues with the images more often.
I need a better solution, with these being the basic conditions:
I can edit in a WYSIWYG editor that can take pasted images directly into the post. Ideally this is hosted online so I can switch computers, but offline is acceptable if necessary.
Wherever I’m editing, once I’m done, I can paste the thing into Wordpress or otherwise easily get it there and post.
Cost in setup time and dollars is ‘reasonable’ in context.
There are other features I’d like, especially better comment formatting/threading, but they’re not important.
Any suggestions? This seems like a crowd that would know what to do here. Also, mod team, should this be happening to the LW version too?
When you drag-and-drop images into LW posts (or paste images from the snippet tool), we upload them into our own CDN, so one option here could be to write the post in the LW editor, and then copy them over into the Wordpress editor. My guess is the copy-pasting should work pretty well out of the box.
I checked and all the images are hosted on googleusercontent.com which is a subdomain that Google uses to hold third party content. The images are probably getting rate limited, as the system serving them was designed to prioritize Google content and not user generated. The practice is usually called hotlinking and that’s why the server started to rate limit. I recommend that you try and host the images on your own Wordpress. Otherwise, maybe throwing Cloudflare in front of your site as a caching layer might be an easier solution.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google as an engineer, but I’m very far away from this system.)
So I’d put the images on Wordpress except that would require using their editor to do so, and their editor is a walking dumpster fire. I could try to reclaim the old editor by using a plug-in but they want $300/year for that, which seems pretty extreme (I’d do it if I couldn’t find any other solution I suppose, it’s not THAT much money, it just stings quite a lot). Cloudflare at $5/month seems better and potentially gives better performance. Can anyone confirm whether this would be a good idea?
Is the Wordpress editor so unusably bad that it’s unbearable (like >$300/year of annoyance) to use it just for swapping in the images? (That is: do what you do now, except that after pasting it in from the Google doc, you go through and do whatever you need to do to change each image from a hotlink to googleusercontent.com into a thing hosted by Wordpress—which in an ideal world might just mean copying each image and pasting it on top of itself, though no doubt Wordpress have found a way to make it much more painful than that.)
What does the $300 plugin do that “classic block” doesn’t do? I just edit my posts inside a single classic block, which seems to be identical to the old WordPress editor, including the ability to directly edit the html.
I’m sorry Zvi, but I’ve now realized that you are running on a wordpress.com subdomain. You won’t be able to use Cloudflare, unless you upgrade to the Wordpress business plan (£20 a month) so that you can install plugins.
I don’t have any simple and effective ideas for what you could do, other than putting a call to action for somebody who has more Wordpress experience to help you migrate to a more sustainable setup.
That’s a problem I’ve heard about on the Wordpress versions of these posts but that’s the first I’ve heard of it happening on LW. It’s been especially bad this week from all reports.
What’s happening is this:
I write the post in Google, using Snipping Tool or Copy Image to grab the images and pasting them into a Google Doc.
I copy/paste the Google Doc into Wordpress. I used to edit directly in Wordpress but their new ‘blocks’ editor is unusably bad unless someone explains why it isn’t. Seriously, wow, it’s bad.
I post to Wordpress.
Post gets copied over to LessWrong from Wordpress.
My current understanding is that this causes the images to remain hosted by Google (and GWS’s comment suggests this is also true of the LW version), and as popularity of the posts has gone up over time, I’m running into rate-limit issues with the images more often.
I need a better solution, with these being the basic conditions:
I can edit in a WYSIWYG editor that can take pasted images directly into the post. Ideally this is hosted online so I can switch computers, but offline is acceptable if necessary.
Wherever I’m editing, once I’m done, I can paste the thing into Wordpress or otherwise easily get it there and post.
Cost in setup time and dollars is ‘reasonable’ in context.
There are other features I’d like, especially better comment formatting/threading, but they’re not important.
Any suggestions? This seems like a crowd that would know what to do here. Also, mod team, should this be happening to the LW version too?
When you drag-and-drop images into LW posts (or paste images from the snippet tool), we upload them into our own CDN, so one option here could be to write the post in the LW editor, and then copy them over into the Wordpress editor. My guess is the copy-pasting should work pretty well out of the box.
I checked and all the images are hosted on googleusercontent.com which is a subdomain that Google uses to hold third party content. The images are probably getting rate limited, as the system serving them was designed to prioritize Google content and not user generated. The practice is usually called hotlinking and that’s why the server started to rate limit. I recommend that you try and host the images on your own Wordpress. Otherwise, maybe throwing Cloudflare in front of your site as a caching layer might be an easier solution.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google as an engineer, but I’m very far away from this system.)
So I’d put the images on Wordpress except that would require using their editor to do so, and their editor is a walking dumpster fire. I could try to reclaim the old editor by using a plug-in but they want $300/year for that, which seems pretty extreme (I’d do it if I couldn’t find any other solution I suppose, it’s not THAT much money, it just stings quite a lot). Cloudflare at $5/month seems better and potentially gives better performance. Can anyone confirm whether this would be a good idea?
Is the Wordpress editor so unusably bad that it’s unbearable (like >$300/year of annoyance) to use it just for swapping in the images? (That is: do what you do now, except that after pasting it in from the Google doc, you go through and do whatever you need to do to change each image from a hotlink to googleusercontent.com into a thing hosted by Wordpress—which in an ideal world might just mean copying each image and pasting it on top of itself, though no doubt Wordpress have found a way to make it much more painful than that.)
If it’s literally that, then it’s on the borderline. If it’s harder, then yeah, it’s that bad.
What does the $300 plugin do that “classic block” doesn’t do? I just edit my posts inside a single classic block, which seems to be identical to the old WordPress editor, including the ability to directly edit the html.
I’m sorry Zvi, but I’ve now realized that you are running on a wordpress.com subdomain. You won’t be able to use Cloudflare, unless you upgrade to the Wordpress business plan (£20 a month) so that you can install plugins.
I don’t have any simple and effective ideas for what you could do, other than putting a call to action for somebody who has more Wordpress experience to help you migrate to a more sustainable setup.