Those of you who paradoxically were early enough in Figment Area's run to see my blog on Wordpress - or just those of you who looked deeper in the archive - are probably wondering why I moved from Wordpress to Blogspot after only two posts.
Yeah I could tell you. Oh, you want to know? You'd like to know why? Great! I'll tell you!
Well, you see, basically it's... well yeah, Wordpress is a fucking piece of cow shit! There you go buddy. I didn't talk like this in the title only because I've never been quite certain about the safeness of swearing in your Internet creation titles. Believe me, I wanted to make a title that was harder on the place.
I'll go into more detail, but first, a bit of backstory would help us out, here.
In 2011, whenabouts, I was using Blogspot. It was my only choice and only choice I even considered, and then I stopped using it because I wasn't into what my old blog was doing, as a series of writing pieces, just in terms of what the content could be. It was called The Alternate and Crappier Science, and it was fundamentally a bit hamstrung by its own core concept, which I guess is sort of why I gave up on it.
That's fine. The problem was, later on I somehow got into my head the idea that Blogspot was bugged out, not well designed, and able to screw me over. Formatting automatically getting tangled and confusing because of What-You-See-Is-Blah-Blah editing was certainly an issue at one point, even if just in my head. But I honestly think it would be too hard for me to explain to you what the origin of that assumption was, and that I'd only be giving theories. Theories that are too hard for me to articulate.
So in the 2020's, or The Dire 20's as I like to call it, when I got to the point of wanting to make Figment Area, I changed my current writing home to Wordpress, as I'd spent years anticipating.
Oh boy, was I tragically fucking wrong in doing that.
I thought Blogspot would glitch out, be hard to format, and make writing hard. Choosing Wordpress was ridiculously ironic, because that's exactly what Blogspot seems to hardly be doing at all right now, and what Wordpress did to me instead.
Writing the Tom and Jerry post on Wordpress was a fucking nightmare. I don't remember how hard the Wawoo one was, but the Tom and Jerry one definitely must have been a fucked up experience. Instead of going over that, I'll try to describe what happens when you - as a hypothetical thought experiment subject - try to write a blog post on Wordpress, and you try to make it designed your way.
After finding the new post button in a long, gross, annoyingly-animated sidebar with buttons hidden inside buttons, you get a fucking piece of shit interface where the amazing present-day team has thrown out those archaic, old fashioned boxes that "indicate where stuff's boundaries are and where you're supposed to click" and give us this new, modern, slick piece of shit that I'll redraw for you here.
Now, just in case you have some concerns about me, and how I decided to draw all that because I don't know how to take a screenshot, you should know that this thought is not true. I deliberately opted for drawing the picture instead of just copying a screenshot over because I thought it was a good idea. I'm not Wordpress, I'm actually pretty smart.
So that right there is a pretty big red flag. A red flag I don't know how I ignored when I was starting out with it. Not only are the boundaries you can use to have a frame of reference imaginary and the graphic design obviously full of itself, but apparently the text writing interface is made of "block oriented writing". That's the name I've given it.
You have to make a new block when you want to add content to the writing. Every time. Whether it's a paragraph, an image, or "a quote". Can I explain to you what this means? No. Is it fucking annoying to use by design and breaking all the time, possibly not by design? Hell yes it is.
And I still hadn't quite yet realized how bad of a place I was in.
Wordpress' interface here is one of those annoying editors where the actual formatting buttons - like, if you want some of your text to be bigger, italicized, bold, aligned to the right, etc. - are not constantly visible. They are hidden until you're writing something and have... highlighted it or something. It was irrelevant and a waste of time on Tumblr, and it's like that on Wordpress. And it's way worse on Wordpress. Thank you, Blogger, for not being this way, which is a grace I thankfully experience the very minutes I write this angry open hate letter. Seeing those buttons stay up there at the top of my post editor feels like a blessing.
It's going to get worse, if you're not convinced. This post will go further and show more horrendous problems. Earlier on in this post's development, I followed that previous sentence with "That are more horrendous." I no longer, in 2023 (this post took ages to be finished and published) believe that is the case. The post editor is the worst part of Wordpress, though yes there are other issues with using the website that haven't been reached by the expected line of reading yet.
I will still be talking about the post editor for a while, but it goes beyond that. I pity your soul if you thought I was going to rip into the editor for posts and that was it. The crap virus on Wordpress runs very deep, from how your website's appearance unexpectedly and uncontrollably turns out all the way down to navigating the dashboard menus.
Back to the awful block oriented writing, let's assume for a minute that you want to have more of a theme going on with the formatting of your writing. Maybe you want to make it the right size because it doesn't start off at the right size. Now let's imagine this crazy idea that you want the sizes to be the same as each other, or as a critic would call it, consistent. Good fucking luck, buddy. Block oriented writing is a bitch when you can't rely on the other mechanics to let you control everything at once, or even decide on the default for what formatting you get every time you make a new block. And these blocks? To the reader they're just paragraphs. Paragraphs as in "<p>" and "</p>" if you know about markdown. You can't make a line break without risking making a new one. Paragraphs that can't be moved around or merged back together easily. Paragraphs that have a rigid border that makes itself both unnecessarily important and hardly visible and difficult to find.
It's absolute bullshit.
I'm sick of talking about the editor now, so let's move on to what's outside the editor.
One of the most audacious examples of bullshit about Wordpress is what happens when you're trying to get an archive system that links to all of your older and newer posts in a convenient and logical way working. Wordpress has "Next" and Previous" buttons at the bottom of its posts - obviously meaning they only let you skip ahead or backward by one unit at a time, and apparently they think this is enough. Let's have a look at the archive that I manually - yes, manually - put together on the Wordpress version of this blog.
I'm going to break down why this thing is so fucked up over the course of two or three paragraphs. First, the more noticeable thing to a casual reader is probably the big rectangle next to "EARLIEST", unnecessarily low-reaching and asymmetrical with its counterpart on the right, beside "LATEST". I couldn't do anything about that, even though this is a technical custom extra page, not a main section regular old blog post. It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure that's a compromise I did by sacrificing a vertical line character that is found on nearly any normal keyboard, which the site then automatically enlarged because it's trying to do that thing that happens at the start of some books, not an actual HTML rectangle div. Wow, so fancy! I looked up the name of this keyboard character for the first time in my life while writing this very paragraph, and according to Wikipedia it's only been uncreatively named "vertical bar" this whole time. I dislike that and know a lot of stuff about programming, so let's just call this one "Char124". If not for the fact that I was forced to sacrifice a Char124 to the fanciness goblin, this manually-maintained nightmare page might actually look good.
Now, about those Earliest/Latest buttons... I typed out those words and hyperlinked them manually. The dates next to the post titles are filled in manually. The post titles are typed and hyperlinked manually. If I kept using Wordpress today, and had more and more posts coming out on it, I would have to be going back to this page and manually updating the list once and the hyperlinks twice every time a new post came out. I don't imagine that the editor on this would be particularly co-operative either.
For some reason, right now I have a manual index of articles on the Blogspot version of this site too, but it looks better, isn't necessarily required, as there's already an automatic post list on every post page, and at least it'll actually edit properly if I keep it around.
This is a minor point in my mind at this stage, probably just because I've forgotten just how far this thing went, but the wideness and emptiness of a standard Wordpress page is uncomfortable. There's just kind of a distressing and anxious broadness to everything that makes me feel lost. I got a bit paranoid and checked, but nope - the site design on my Blogger one isn't as bad as that. It's always been nicer to look at and doesn't feel like walking on a plank high above a perilous pit void while wind is blowing at you, even if maybe the Blogspot version I made still looks a little weird.
As well as all that, it's too hard to find CSS options and other options when designing your site, according to older records. I don't want to try testing it again now. I don't remember what going through these hoops was like, but I trust my past self on this one, who started writing the Wordpress hate into a Blogspot post during a time that may now be about two years ago. That's the other point, it's been really long, I want to wrap this up now and not suffer Wordpress experiences much longer.
Finally, getting posted previews for your Wordpress links when you post one in something like MeWe or Discord to play nice is way too hard. The first times I checked, it just brought out these white rectangles of nothing, with support giving no real solution to people after I looked it up, I am damn sure of it. Well, it was like that at the time - I just tested it on Jan 7 2023 now, with no obvious error still showing - which I guess was a bug they fixed, but Wordpress had its chance even way more months before I was having problems with that, so it's way too late for redemption now. I don't want this company trying to make me feel crazy just because I remember something that doesn't happen now, either.
So that's Wordpress, a shitty blogging website that I hope I never use again. What messes with me most about this whole thing is that other people actually use Wordpress somehow. People can write on Wordpress and say "Yeah, this works! I'll keep using this for my blog!" In fact, two of the people in this situation are people I know, people from my family.
But I don't envy these people. I'm just a bit disgusted with them. As in nausea, not something like actually believing in someone being reprehensible. Now, I would be disgusted in that sense if certain people tried to actually convert me.
With the people I know who use Wordpress, or anybody really, I
don't know what they did to tolerate Wordpress, but I don't want to try to tolerate it ever, and I get the feeling
that potentially I'll be hearing things like "Oh, you can fix that" or
"there's a way to turn that off". No. Just no. I don't care. It would
have taken me months to figure those things out on my own. I severely
doubt the intentions and lasting quality of a service that hides the
good answers so well and would make me go through heaps of hoops just to
get a good experience because terrible decisions are the default
experience. I don't give a fuck. I don't give a fuck if Wordpress bans
me, either, that's like being banned from using a horrible public toilet
complex that you don't need and absolutely hate. Naturally, this makes it blatantly obvious that I won't be taking kindly to suggestions that I can pay for a better version of Wordpress, either. At this point, even if Wordpress gets improved massively one day and all my problems with it have technically been fixed, I will not forgive it. It put me through too much.
Use your shit website if you want, but don't try to convince me to come sauntering back in to that hellhole. I won't try to sell you on switching to Blogspot, but for everybody's sake and the nature of supporting the best competitor in a competitive market where it's easy for a bad place to become the next Tyrannitar, I hope you would use Blogspot in the extreme hypothetical case that Wordpress is your best other option. Otherwise, I don't really feel fond of the idea of saying "This place sucks, but I can recommend this other place that blah-!" Who knows how well that would age, or if I'd be the one being annoying? It's easy to imagine such a recommendation being annoying. For the time being, Blogspot is a decent place for me to call my current vein of written content's home. In this new age where it's all Figment Area and no TAACS, so far it's given me minor trouble at worst.
All I can say is, don't use Wordpress. I don't want people to suffer through it or support it. Wordpress is a garbage titan that does evil and gets more reward than it deserves, on par with Facebook, Quora, and YouTube. Wordpress, you can suck on an expired eggplant.
