I hope today has started bright and well for you? Today's post is going to be short and sweet and straight to the point. In recent days PublishOx have updated their post editor and I thought it was appropriate to provide some feedback on it.

You may ask why? Well it is really very simple, any kind of coaching or development must as an absolute priority include an element of Continuous Improvement, which by definition is an ever improving and self-feeding cycle. A few years ago I put the following graphic together to illustrate my point.

Very simply you can join the cycle at any point, but it is usual to start at the assessment level.

• What is the current situation?
• What are its weaknesses?
• What isn't working?
• What is working well and should it be expanded?

These are the kind of questions, strategic by nature, that need to be asked and the above only provides a simple sample, each question needs to be tailor-made to the specific situation.

Then once the assessment has been completed it is time to move on to the planning stage, in which the questions asked during the assessment stage are addressed with specific solutions and the necessary resources are allocated (both human and non-human) to a specific itinerary (the reason for making this bold text will be explained below).

Then finally and most logically it comes to the implementation stage in which the resulting plan, based on the assessment comes to life and is brought into the system and then very simply the cycle starts again. What happens as a result is a perpetual drive to make things better with each complete cycle. At the beginning when an organisation starts to work to this pattern the results can be quite dramatic, but steadily decrease in impact as each cycle comes to represent nothing more than marginal improvements.

So after making a short story long... I had to give you something to read ( :) ) I want to quickly review the latest iteration of the Publish0x editor. In reality I only have three observations to make.

Some of the items in the top bar have been replace with icons or have been made a bit bigger. The result is that (certainly on my browser) that they no longer fit neatly in one line. Here is a screenshot I took a few minutes ago (you may have noticed that I changed the title!).

It is obviously not a real issue, as it is only to do with asethetics and to push this point really would be unnecessary nit-picking. In the end the truth is that it is probably more to do with my size settings than anything else, in which case the responsibility is mine and mine alone. 

My second observation - and I really like this one - is that any blockquote is now obviously a blockquote, shown through indentation and the use of a vertical line to the left of the text.

In the past within the editor it was not directly possible to see; the only way to tell was by looking to see if the blockquote icon was highlighted in the top menu bar.

My third observation which is more annoying is that when the editor highlights with red underline a misspelt word the previous iteration used to offer a correction option. Now. clicking on the said word just want to turn it into a link; as illustrated in the following screenshot from a bit earlier in the editable version of this post.

You might recall that I made this word bold and said I would come back to it, and I am not even writing it now for reasons that I will explain. For some reason this is one of those words that I just can't spell correctly and trying to turn into a link offers me little or no value at all; especially when I need to go to another page to check the spelling (or even reach for a dictionary; not that i do that - it is 2026 after all!). I can see the value in providing such a shortcut - assuming the word is spelt correctly, but frankly it just gets in the way.

So in the end, my final observation is that on the whole it is just window-dressing that at most makes the interface more attractive, but also, as highlighted, raises its own issues. However, that aside, personally I am very happy that Publish0x are always looking for ways to move forwards and improve their system for the benefit of the community as a whole. 

Settlement = Stagnation

Naturally, this involves taking some wrong turns on the way - and I am stopping short of calling this a wrong turn - but that is the nature of the game and the fact is that we often learn more when something falls short during implementation, however well it has been planned after the assessment has revealed a potential issue.

Sorry, guys I couldn't resist that, after what I wrote earlier.

As always stay safe and well my friends.