This is a long post that goes into specifics about my recent experience trying to get this blog started and why I chose wordpress.org over wordpress.com. It’s an account of my personal experience, and I’m not endorsing or non-endorsing anything. And I’m certainly not getting paid.
I’m from the Digital Translator generation. That means I’m not a digital native; rather, I learned computers. In the 90s, I taught myself how to type using a 1920s typing manual I’d picked up at a church rummage sale. [For a cool exploration of the regional differences in that term – yard sale, garage sale, carport sale, tag sale, etc. – and many other localisms in the US, see Joshua Katz’s work including the book! with! maps! Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse , and You Guys Talk: A Visual Guide.] I ended up taking a computer class in high school where we learned about Windows 95. There was something out there called a “mouse” that was supposed to make it all easier, but my attitude was that I didn’t need no stinkin’ mouse because I had all the commands memorized not only in my brain but in my muscle memory. (That persisted through much of college and beyond, until WordPerfect – sigh – was finally retired and we all became mouse users.)
At some point I visited my brother in college, and he showed me how he could type some letters into a computer and get a list of the concerts that were happening at another university. Crazy! It wasn’t useful information, but it was cool; the proto-internet was a curiosity. I received my first email in 1995; it was about the O. J. Simpson verdict.
Because I learned along with the internet, I’ve always been fairly wily at troubleshooting. (My mother still thinks I’m a genius, and one of my editing clients who has three PhDs also does, because I showed him where his email program had hidden a menu that he needed to use all the time.) That skill came in handy when I worked in public service at a library and was often called on to find a way around some protection or some some basic function that Microsoft has broken or hidden in the latest greatest update.
Over the last few years, those instances of frustration have become more and more frequent. A new operating system means more invasiveness and less basic functionality. To me, it seems like everyone’s figuring how much MORE profit they can make if the dumbness of the basic programs included in a package drives people to pay for their premium programs. Here’s one example, just one.
In a recent update to the Photos program that comes with Windows 10 [aside: some people, or perhaps some robots, refer to such programs as “free.” However, “included in the initial cost” is not “free,” and I maintain that we are paying for these crappy programs], they took away the ability to delete photos quickly. Since I photograph birds, my camera is set to the kind of fast repetitive shutter action that sports photographers use, so that occasionally I can get a great photo out of a batch of fifty. Let’s say it’s a common yellowthroat. They’re not elusive – they’ll let you get close to them – but they’re constantly in motion, darting behind leaves and sticks and skulking low on the ground under vegetation. I’ll have fifty photos and need to delete all but five.
Time was, I could look at the photos one by one in the biggest size, full screen, and delete the duds quickly using keyboard shortcuts, since I’m a touch-typer. I scrolled from one photo to the next with a finger from my right hand on the right arrow button. Another right hand finger was on the Delete key, and a finger from my left hand was on the Enter key.
That’s because a window would pop up after I hit the Delete key that said, “Are you sure you want to delete this photo?” Since “yes” was the default, when I pressed Enter, it deleted.” Then, with my fast little keyboard shortcut, it went to the next photo. Or if I wanted to keep one, I just pressed the right arrow key. I never had to look at the keyboard.
Don’t get me wrong, I like that pop-up window. Occasionally I’d get in the rhythm and accidentally press Delete when I really wanted to keep the photo. It’s a safety that I want and need.
Now, that window has a check box on it that says “don’t show this message again.” This is a conundrum, and here’s why. If I check the box, I will never again have that pop-up box for safety. But if I uncheck it, “Yes” is no longer the default answer for “Are you sure you want to delete this?” I can either click Yes or No, but that involves a manual click for every. Single. Photo.
Yes, I’ve figured out hacks, but those also involve heavy mouse use. One is to click the heart on the ones I want to keep, sort the photos by rating, and batch-delete the rest. But the heart button isn’t very responsive and often fails (it will click on and then immediately off again even though I only clicked once, so I don’t trust it). It’s possible that the touch screen might work, but mine has been shattered for a while due to a string of incidents both human and feline, and now it only works on the bottom left.
Sigh.
I’ve been creating and maintaining my professional website since 2008. First, I used Yola because a friend knew some hacks to get mp3s to play on it so I could put up samples of my singing work. I stuck with that for a long time because it worked okay for my purposes, but it was not intuitive to use. It was Flash-based, and when Flash started becoming a major security hazard, I decided to try something else. I looked around and decided on Wix, mainly because out of all the website templates out there, they had one that I found appealing.
Wix is very slow – I think it’s based in the UK and has to swim here – and because of that, I’ll often click on an element twelve times, not knowing whether I’ve turned a feature on or off (say, to edit text in a box versus to move the box around or change the size). It’s not that I’m impatient – it’s just that after a couple of seconds when nothing has happened and you don’t see a wheel spinning or those little dots dancing around, you assume based on your other computer experience that the click just didn’t work, and you click again.
Other than that fairly major annoyance, Wix was fairly intuitive to set up and is pretty easy to use for my very light-use purposes. I only update it once or twice a month at most, and it’s populated with nothing more than a few mp3s, videos, photos, and links. I don’t sell anything directly from there. Rather than defining colums or other formatting, you really can just drag things around, and they stick there, and these handy little lines show up in pretty colors to indicate that the box you just dragged over is indeed in line with its companion.
All that is to say that I have more than zero experience with a CMS (Content Management System).
I wanted to start a blog (this one) with some specific purposes as I’m diversifying my brand. For example, it doesn’t make sense for my nature photos and my publications to be on my professional singer site. I also have some goods and services to advertise and sell now. I wanted to do all that as myself rather than having one site for this and one for that.
I did some reading to understand whether wordpress.com or wordpress.org – with an independent hosting site – would be better for me. Most of what I read signified that .org was aimed much more at people who work heavily with html and can code things themselves. That didn’t sound like it was for me because I only know the very most basic HTML, like I’m confident editing spelling, capitalization, and punctuation in Wikipedia but wouldn’t try to do any sort of formatting (though I think I could figure out bold and italics). I tried out wordpress.com and made a sample website. I ran into some problems but attributed them to working with a new tool, and I got a professional subscription. Their help center responded quickly when I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why one paragraph was indented, and I couldn’t figure out how to undo it. They said it was inside a layout box and suggested taking it out of there. I wasn’t sure how I’d created a layout box without knowing it, but I’m sure I did – I was probably just experimenting with all the features.
Well. It never got better.
They recently phased out the more word processor-like editing utility and replaced it with something called Gutenberg, which works with “blocks.” You can choose a formatting block in which you can put other blocks. You can choose a button block or an image block or a paragraph or heading block. Other programs call these widgets, but this has a separate section for widgets. I’m not sure how they define the difference, and it really doesn’t matter – I just want it to work.
I may not have given up and walked away if wordpress.com hadn’t been so damn slow. I have some culpability here in that my computer’s memory is reaching capacity with all those photos, sound recordings, and all sorts of junk that’s piled up in there since the COVID-19 pandemic when I’ve done multiple bazillions of takes of virtual choir tracks and other things – wav and video files that eat a lot of space. So I know it could be a better environment on my end. However, sometimes the thing would just completely freeze, but it wasn’t my whole computer that was frozen, just wordpress.com. So I think that was on them. (My internet is stable.)
That said, as I populated my blog, I felt like I was in an abusive relationship, like I was being gaslighted. Something would work just fine one day and not the next. I’d change the color of something and see the changes and save and publish, and the next day the color was back to the original. I’d set up some content successfully in a particular layout block, no problem (except the slowness), and the next time I went to do the same thing, I had all sorts of issues with the formatting or some other functionality. The editor view was substantially different from the live view. There were random huge spaces everywhere and even some random html that appeared on the live site that I couldn’t see in the editor.
Menus seemed to come and go on a whim. Both the main editing dashboard menus and the little menus that pop up when you need to do something to a block. And when I could see those menus, they were often missing what I felt was very basic functionality.
After a couple of weeks of messing around with it and reading a lot of help/support manuals, I felt like I hadn’t gotten any closer to being able to just do my thing without worrying about the technology. The penultimate straw was this. I had a three-column horizontal block in which each column contained a photo, a headline, a paragraph, and a button, all of which were centered within their column. It had come with the template, and I was customizing it because I thought it looked nice and worked well for my purpose. It’s a photo, a little description, and then click here on this button to buy this thing or learn more or whatever. I customized it with my own content and added links to the photos and buttons.
When I needed to come back later and edit what the button in the first column said, I clicked on there and started typing. Somehow the button went away, and I couldn’t undo it (possibly because it hung up so long without my knowing it that I lost track of my undo/redo history). Fine, I thought, and I inserted a new button block.
I spent the next hour trying to figure out why the other buttons were centered in their columns and this one was flush left. I tried every hack I could think of. I consulted Help, which – and here’s a big beef with WordPress.com – often took me to the old! help! manual! For the old “classic” editor that actually seemed like it had some functionality! Please don’t roll out a new product and link to the old help manual so that your user can see exactly how easy it used to be to do what you can’t do now! That is the opposite of help!
Okay. Obviously, first I tried to find a way to align the button so it was centered, to no avail. That option didn’t pop up on the button block.
Not on that particular button block, anyway.
The other two button blocks? On the other two columns? They had that option on their little popup menu. Yup. I could spend the rest of my days under the sun centering, lefting, and righting those puppies to my heart’s content. But not the one I wanted to center. I threw that into the help chat, but by the time I got the email reply (I don’t consider that a problem – I was not expecting immediate help), I’d already experienced the last straw.
The last straw was when I made a two-column layout where I wanted one photo (with clickable link) in the first column and three photos with clickable links in the second column. I got the photos in there, and it looked okay, and I even figured out that I could manually change the spacing of the columns to make the first one bigger (even though these little draggable lines kept appearing that looked like they’d let you drag it to the area you wanted – they’d let me drag them, but then the columns bounced right back to their original sizes every time, and I still don’t know what the draggable lines were about. Whatever, learning curve, right?)
I added the link to the photo in the first column. When I went to do the same for the three photos in the second column, which were in a non-scrolling mosaic block within that block, it wouldn’t let me. The popup came up and the option to add a link wasn’t there. I couldn’t add links to photos in a gallery.
At that point, I walked away, flabbergasted. Later that evening I made a sample blog on Blogger (which is included with a Google account), and I called it “pleasebebetterthanwordpress,” but I quickly realized that that would not do for a professional blog. Should I now just walk away from hours, entire days of work setting up and populating the blog, thus delaying the release of my EP that was already delayed due to COVID-19 staffing shortages and other forces way beyond my control? I slept on it.
I woke up with the sun the next morning and did some research. I finally decided that since Bluehost had a free trial, I would grab that and spend several hours working with a new, different wordpress.org site to see if it was any better. After all, I’ve worked heavily with open-source software (Audacity is the big one), and I knew that wouldn’t be the kind of stumbling block it might be for other people. I set it all up: I got a Bluehost account and picked out a theme (Nirvana) for my wordpress.org site, but I didn’t re-point my domain because I just wanted to try it.
It wasn’t long before I was having some of the same problems with wordpress.org as I had had with wordpress.com: it seemed like menus would just disappear, and I couldn’t figure out where things were that I’d seen before. I dug around in Help, and the creators of the theme (Nirvana) recommended a plugin that offered all manner of customization and functionality, crazy crazy stuff like changing the color of the text. (I know.) I installed that and couldn’t believe how much control it gave me over all sorts of elements. Then I saw that I could even install the classic editor that they’d apparently killed on wordpress.com, so I did.
You won’t believe this, but I didn’t like it, because by that time I’d fairly well figured out how the Gutenberg block thing worked, and it seemed like the classic editor had fewer options for basic things I needed like setting columns. Rather than learn that, which will probably be sunsetted soon, I deactivated it and went back to the blocks. (That’s not a glowing endorsement, because I’m still frustrated by some of them, but on wordpress.org they seem fairly usable.)
The huge, main thing is that having a wordpress.org site hosted by Bluehost just makes it infinitely faster and more responsive (I’m using that word in the English rather than Internet sense). I mean when you do something, you can see immediately that it’s done, or not done, or whatever, and you’re not sitting there staring at it wondering whether it was an illegal move or whether you’d eventually see it jump into place when the program was good and ready. With a day of work, I have the blog set up. It looks pretty much like I want it to look, and I’m confident that I’ll learn most of the quirks.
My caveat, though, is that I’ve been spending a lot of time on Help forums, and I’ve seen people going bonkers when their theme or wordpress.org does an update without anyone’s knowledge and without any way of reversion, and completely breaks their site. So I’m guessing that will happen to me just like it happens when Windows 10 updates and for the fourteenth time disables the orange light on my keyboard that means “this is muted,” and I have to re-install the drivers manually. (My take on that is that it seems like Windows 10 is a parasite on my HP laptop and always will be.)
I’ll say one thing about open-source software like wordpress.org and Audacity, which I use for sound editing. There often seems to be a great chasm between me, the average user, and the developers, in terms of what is intuitive or common sense. That’s not a criticism, just an observation, and I greatly appreciate people who donate their time and skills to the open-source community. It’s things like this: in Audacity, I wanted to reduce the volume of a track. To me, that seems like Sound Editing 101, something that people would want to do so often that it would definitely have its own obvious button. It took me FOR. EVER. to finally find someone out there in open-source land who said “Oh, you just go to ‘Amplify’ and put in a negative value.”
That kind of thing.
This isn’t an endorsement or non-endorsement of anything, and certainly no one has offered to pay me to say anything. It’s just my experience. I would actually be glad to test features on a CMS because I think the way I interact with it is very different from how coders see it from the back end. So bring on the paid offers. 🙂 Oh, and the good news is that WordPress.com gave me a refund on the pro subscription I’d paid for. I actually wasn’t expecting that and thought I’d have to eat the cost, so they get a point for that.
That’s all, at least for now. As Gary Larson said in my Number One favorite book The PreHistory of the Far Side, “I don’t know how interesting any of this really is, but now you’ve got it in your brain cells so you’re stuck with it.”
