In an attempt to somehow get the reblog button to show up in the scroll, I switched templates four times in about two hours today.
Apparently, REBLOG doesn’t work while scrolling on any template and what is more, a lot of templates have some very strange formatting I’ve never seen before. I couldn’t even recover the format I was previously using. It has vanished.
I hate to say this, but they are doing it to us again. I have no idea exactly what they are doing, but the software is changing. Without getting complicated, WordPress’s upgrades give me a migraine.
Be aware that if it changed on my blog, it’s likely to change on yours. Maybe not immediately, but eventually, so don’t be surprised when it occurs. I hoped it might be that specific template, but the same thing was true on every template I tried.
I put a note at the top of my WIDGETS column explaining that if you want to use REBLOG, you have to click on the title for that blog. You won’t find a reblog button while scrolling. Also, the bizarre spacing issues are back again and your choices for headings are large (which is the same as ‘Normal’) and small, which is too small and sets the title tight against the following paragraph making it not only hard to see but unattractive. I yearn for the day when you could indicate font size using points.
NONE of the newer templates let you use the full wide of the page. They are all scrunched into a smaller panel, probably to accommodate phone users, The problem is, for art and photography blogs, it means you can’t show off your work properly.
I have fought the good fight and lost. One of these days, I think they really ARE going to push me out.
I write comments, but when I go back and look, they are gone. Likes appear, then vanish. If I don’t seem to be responding, it isn’t that I’m not. It’s that my comments are vanishing. If I discover one missing, I try to replace it. But sometimes the second one doesn’t “take” either.
I’m hoping this is one of those problems that will take care of itself. Since I wasn’t writing new posts, I’ve had time to read other people’s work and commented on almost everything … and I have a funny feeling that my comments never made it. And today, I have no new email, either. None. instead of the few hundred I get, there’s nothing at all.
It’s all weird, but part of our special high-end service from WordPress.
But just so you know, I have been doing a LOT of commenting but how much of it appears I don’t know. And I haven’t gotten any notices of new posts from ANYONE tonight.
Nothing at all. Has everyone stopped writing? All at the same time?
I’m sorry. Didn’t use the “word of the day” because this needed to go out to everyone I could send it to. No matter how little you pay attention to what’s going on in your technical department, you should read this because it really does matter to you and all of us.
So, for the moment, Tyngpress.com is closed, but despite that everyone says “it was closed down,” they closed THEMSELVES down and were NOT forced to close. I got this note this morning from “Web.Informer.com”:
Hello,
Thanks for your message. Could you please send us a direct link to this info on website.informer.com? We will remove it asap.
This is a full spammer website stealing other people’s material without authorization or permission. Does not create any of his/her own material but steals it, largely from WordPress but probably from others, too. Remove him. Dangerous.
79011:414394
But the message on the actual website (Tygpress.com) was this:
Tygpress.comis temporarily out of service due to technical issues. will be back soon…
Tygpress.comwas created with an intention to create a blog search site, but due to some techical issues, full contents of respective sites were being displayed instead of just excerpts as intended. We thank the complainants for bringing this issue to our notice and We are extremely sorry to the content owners.
This is a literal paste-down, so the misspellings are (for once) not mine.
This comment does NOT indicate they were closed down but are obviously getting hit by a lot of complaints. Duh.
And this site is one of the thousands, maybe millions of such sites. They are all over the world. We have no control over them. This particular one actually had a platform on another server, but many of them have their own servers and work for governments who not only do not care about “us,” but are intentionally out to get us.
Be careful what you post, especially if you have any intention of publishing it. Do NOT publish original artwork if it is something you intend to sell or simply is very dear to you.
These pieces of scum are everywhere and they are targeting every single one of us. I’ve been hacked. Fandango has been hacked. I’m sure many more of us have been hacked. Some of us got off lightly, others had to pay for it. I was also locked out of my own computer, but I spent two full days UNlocking.
PLEASE BACK UP YOUR MATERIAL AND DO IT REGULARLY, EVEN THOUGH IT IS BORING.
MORE IS BETTER.
When you clean off your computer, you clean off EVERYTHING THAT WAS ON IT. You are effectively wiping your hard drive which is fine if your material was backed up onto at least TWO SEPARATE EXTERNAL DRIVES and the rest of it lives on external drives belonging to companies like Amazon and Dell and other major cloud providers.
Google is useless. They won’t do anything and we won’t even discuss Facebook.
WordPress is equally useless. You can enter into their “blocked” functions anything you like, but it doesn’t accomplish anything. They have no effective security arrangements.
No matter WHAT they say, they are lying.
They have also made it (by the way), nearly impossible to get material from new folders in graphics (photographs, in essence).
All you get now is a list. You can’t see any of the images in the folder.
For those of us that are serious photographers and artists, that means you have to carefully name each item in every new folder– or any older folder you haven’t yet opened.
This is going to require endless hours of additional work for everyone who uses a lot of graphics content. I haven’t even bothered to complain to them, though I suppose I should. From previous experience, when they’ve decided to do something exceptionally stupid, pointless, and counter-productive, they never go back and make it work the way it used to. But this is worse than usual. This is AWFUL.
I’m getting close to giving up. It’s not that I don’t love you all, but I’m paying for the privilege of being virtually completely hackable. I’m running some of the world’s worst software and being talked down to like an infant by the baby morons running their “technical” division — our glorious “happiness engineers.”
All they want is more money when they can’t even deliver what we are already paying for.
NOTE: Adjacent to the “select” section from which you need to pull up a picture, there’s a small icon (I can’t copy it, my snap-catch function won’t work on that screen), but if you click on it, it offers you some choices about how to see images. Anyone who recently got a Microsoft “upgrade” will probably have this problem. Select one of the images!
Even my computer is part of the plot against us! It’s Alienware!
I definitely have a few bones to pick and I’m going to start picking right now. You see, I have these questions. Important questions. And there are, as far as I can tell, no answers to them.
1. Why does WordPress allow us to approve or disapprove comments, but anyone can follow us? Doesn’t that seem wrong to you? I leafed through my thousands of “followers” the other day and exactly as expected, most of the recent ones are spambots. Short of using Captcha, which I consider cruel and unusual punishment, there doesn’t seem to be any way to prevent the spammers from following. I can get rid of their comments, but I can’t get rid of them.
2. No matter what you do, every pingback has to be personally moderated … yet if you allow reblogs — and most of us do — these do NOT need to be moderated, not even for those who have never commented and are essentially anonymous. Thus my posts have been reblogged on all kinds of horrible sites where I would never go, much less see my work posted. Forgive me if the logic of this eludes me.
3. Object linking has become the function that powers our internet experience. For those of you who don’t know much about programming and computer development, a “link” is really an embedded address. Thus a pingback is actually an object “pointer.” It takes the address of a website or some other thing on the internet (it could also be an email address or a picture … or a part number in a database), embeds it in a graphic or text so that when someone clicks on it, it takes them to that place. Like the transporter on the Enterprise.
Bonnie guarding my computer
It’s the computer equivalent of “Scottie, beam me up.” The other day, all my links went wacko. If I clicked on a notification from a follower, I got sent to the Reader … but not to that blogger or that post. Just the top of the Reader. Sometimes, I got the message that the address didn’t exist.
I panicked, contacted WordPress. Who said they would check it out. Yet, before they even had a chance to look at it, it fixed itself and the problem disappeared. That was when I got a notice that other people had begun to have the same problem.
Is our technology beginning to fail because chaos reigns and magic is loose in the world?
4. When my links went berserk, my knee jerk reaction was to get mad. After all the goofy “upgrades” WordPress has been making to their user interface (in my world, it is known as the GUI, pronounced Gooey, or graphical user interface), anything is possible.
I assumed this was another bizarre piece of programming they were foisting on me. Eventually, I realized even WordPress could not possibly consider this acceptable. Not unless they were all taking some heavy hallucinogenic drugs up in the office.
So there you have it, my contentious bone picking of the day.
Watch your links. Keep watching your links.
Aliens are invading the servers.
This is a good time of year to look at statistics. It’s just past the middle of the year and in theory, it should give you a reasonably good idea what the year will look like. But my stats have gotten pretty erratic and I have bursts of big numbers, then occasionally surprisingly low numbers … and we are still hoping to go on vacation next week which will probably mean a nearly zero week for the numbers game.
July’s bar chart (it’s still early today …)
I really shouldn’t care. I’ve been at this a long time and I know that stats don’t mean much except when they dip very low and I realize WordPress has disappeared me from their database.
Again.
Overview. I had 1500 additional Facebook followers a couple of weeks ago as well as 2000 more Blog followers. I wonder where they went?
I’ve had years when I got a huge explosion of big numbers from them and years when I get almost nothing. For reasons I don’t understand, about 1000 of my Facebook followers have recently vanished along with about 2500 blog followers. Not sure what that’s all about but I haven’t cared enough to follow the trail of crumbs and see what’s going on. It would require yet one more annoying conversation with their Happiness Engineers.
Aren’t those people embarrassed by that title? I would be ashamed to tell anyone I was a Happiness Engineer for WordPress or for that matter, for anyone.
Yesterday’s reading states. For unknown reasons, it was a good day.
But I suppose a paying job is a paying job and these days if you get one that pays the most of the bills and keeps and your family living in a house with heat, light, and a roof that doesn’t leak, you’re doing fine.
We used to have higher standards, but as time as marched on and things like “raises” have become scarcer than hen’s teeth, we are just happy if we manage to keep even.
Now that we are on a fixed income, we can’t even count on staying even. In theory, Social Security pays “cost of living” raises to its recipients, but whenever Congress is feeling poor, the first people whose “cost of living” that mangle are retirees. After all, we are old and therefore we don’t need anything, right? Like … you know … food. Medication. A home. A car. We just need a little, dark room in which to quietly disappear.
If we would just stop doing annoying things like voting, we could be completely dismissed.
Except we do vote. More than any other age group, we vote. Moreover, we think about voting well in advance of doing it. We actually watch the news with all the advertisements for medications we can’t afford, reverse mortgages that will ultimately leave us living on the sidewalk, how to sell off our life insurance, and how to sue people who have ripped us off.
Can we sue the Federal Government? They are the biggest ripper-offers of all time.
In God we trust. We might as well trust in God because we sure can’t trust the people we elected. Or other people elected. I’m sure I didn’t elect them!
Stats. I have pretty decent stats. I don’t work at them anymore and when the numbers drop into low digits, I shrug. Tomorrow will be better. Probably. If it isn’t, does it matter?
Basic numbers
All of this mattered more years ago when I was trying to establish a “base.” Now? I’ve got one. It isn’t gigantic, but it’s not tiny, either. If I keep writing, someone will read me. Maybe someone who matters will read me. Maybe I’ll make a difference.
I would like to make a difference, though I’m not sure what that means anymore. The world in which I live is twirling on its ear and the future is looking a bit abbreviated.
It’s interesting, looking at an earlier post and realizing how many “givens” have changed since you wrote it. It was just a few years ago. But oh my, how times have changed.
Maybe I’m just getting a bit beat up from having hung around the blog world too long … or maybe it’s the endless pressure of political reality that is making me crazy and mentally exhausted. Maybe it’s everything.
I think it’s harder to blog now than it was. We used to be able to have fun –without feeling the responsibilities of the world. Funny, light, and airy have become harder to find. Some elements of humor have gone out the window. It’s not that I wanted them to go away, but it has been hard to let go of the awful developments going on around us.
That being said, I can’t talk about the “issues” all the time. I can’t even think about them all the time. In that direction lies madness.
Everyone knows that there are dangerous developments in the world, but we can’t think about them every minute of every day. The world is undergoing a bad turn. We are atop that evil pile. I often wonder if I’m still living in the same country. Is this America?
And it’s international too. Is this my world or have slipped into a parallel reality?
Nonetheless, the basic rules still apply — with a few caveats. WordPress is no longer providing any kind of support to bloggers. No prompts, no awards, no nothing. They ply you with endless advertisements to join up with their “business plan” even if you don’t have a business. They pay no attention to what we ask for. Instead, they give us what they feel like giving us … IF they feel like giving us anything. And they do not believe in beta testing their software.
Don’t count on WordPress to give you a hand. They won’t. Do count on fellow bloggers to give you a hand because we will if we can.
So:
Do what you love. If it’s writing, write. Photography? Take pictures. Excuses are boring. A lot of people spend more time explaining why they can’t write or take a sharp picture than actually writing or focusing the camera.
Don’t whine. We all have problems. (Remind me I said this.) If you are going to whine, try to be funny too.
We are all entitled to a good online rant.Just not every day.
Funny is good.
Keep posts short or at least as concise as you can — given the subject.Some things need more words than others, but when you’re running over a thousand words, put the post away and read it again later or better yet, the next day. I bet you’ll find at least 500 (or more )words you can cut.
Don’t post blurry, bad pictures. Learn to look at your work and appraise it as if it were someone else’s.
Work on improving your craft(s). Write better. Take better pictures.
Proofread! If, like me, you’re a terrible proofreader, use whatever free proofing device you can find. I’m using the free version of Grammarly. I hate to admit it, but it has helped.
Follow your gut. If your gut isn’t telling you anything, try your brain and imagination. If that’s not working, read a book.
STICK WITH IT. You don’t build a following in a week or two.
PERSEVERE! You need to post regularly and often. If you don’t post regularly and often, your readers will wander away.
Many followers will wander no matter what you do. They have their own lives and their own reasons. It isn’t about you. Every two or three years, with some important exceptions, you’ll find you have a new group of followers.
You never know who is reading you. Many folks read, but many fewer comment. Most won’t even drop a “like.” I’ve been shocked at who reads my blog.
Don’t let other people’s stats make you envious. If you stick with it, you’ll get there too.
Check your facts if you are writing anything that contains facts. It’s called credibility. You need it no matter what your government is doing.
There will be no spellchecker. I asked and they answered. This was WordPress’s response:
A. Jay (Automattic)
Jun 22, 07:25 UTC
Hi there,
Thank you for contacting us.
The spellchecker was a part of the publication process. I don’t like Grammarly and it interferes with other apps — and Google’s isn’t very good. What was the problem with including it? Was it in someone’s way? Was it harming someone? I do not understand.
Spell checkers are a specialty product, and it’s not something we specialize in. The WordPress.com spell checker was developed years ago when there didn’t exist any alternatives yet. Since then things have changed and a lot of other companies have started specializing in this, which led to the decision on our end to step back from the field and focus instead on the things we do specialize in.
Modern browsers now provide built-in spell-checking tools, so we have removed this feature from our product to avoid maintaining unnecessary dependencies. I read that you do not like Grammarly or Google’s spell checker, however, following are our recommendations as an alternative option:
the spell-checking built into most browsers
a browser extension that offers additional grammar checks
a third-party service that offers additional grammar checks
Please let us know if you have any questions or if we can help with anything else.
Best,
A. Jay | Happiness Engineer WordPress.com | Automattic Inc.
I’d be interested to find out in exactly what WordPress does specialize. Certainly not in helping bloggers do whatever bloggers do … or creating functional software for bloggers to use. They have been forging ahead with their preconceived notion of what we are supposed to want for years.
None of us were ever consulted. No user surveys were ever taken among users. So with each “update,” they make the software harder to use. More awkward, slower. Essentially, dumber.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. It certainly didn’t surprise me.
They’ve done it again. I don’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it.
For those of you who actually use the various settings for your blog? WordPress has, without any notification to users, changed the way it’s done and what can be done … and worse, changed what the things used to mean to something else.
A lot of changes that were easy to find in a single column in the “old dashboard” are spread into other “new” files that I will only try by using an “open in new tab” option. Otherwise, I’m sure it will become the only option I’ve got. I made that mistake with the block editor, which I wanted to look at to see if I was interested (I wasn’t) — and instead, they installed it and made it impossible to get out of it — after which I spent a week trying to get the old one back.
They have set it up so you CAN get the old one back, but ONLY if you pay them much more money — which is to say, their business rate.
I am not a business.
Nor do I have that kind of money to spend on a blog that’s supposed to be fun. Apparently, it is, as always, entirely about money.
Seriously, not merely how things are done is different, but the same headings don’t mean what they used to. Go to your dashboard and try to set up things like your “primary menu” and “comments.”
That they keep fixing things that aren’t broken, but after they change them are indeed broken. These changes make organizing your posts enormously more complicated. My frustration level is over the top.
I don’t have time or energy for this. I pay them money, they give me what they feel like giving me and change what they want without consulting me or anyone else. I’m still simmering about their changing the “fonts” to “Large, Normal, Small, and Unreadable” as opposed to using the same point system in use everywhere else on the web.
I want to be informed about changes WordPress is making and I want a choice about whether or not I use it.
I AM A CUSTOMER.
I WANT TO BE TREATED LIKE A CUSTOMER.
Since they got back to me from WordPress to tell me they had fixed the “Settings” function in the Reader “Manage” area, I said, “Thank you very much.” After all, they fixed it in one day. It’s a miracle!
Then I said a lot of people were really upset about the removal of the spell checker.
What they said is that almost everyone “up there” uses the free version of Grammarly (I have been using it for a while, too) — and that all browsers include free spell checkers with the browser. Of course, they seem to be unaware that if you are using an iPad or a phone, there might not BE a spell checker in there, but that was their explanation.
A lot of water pouring over the Mumford Dam right now. Another picture to keep us from losing it.
If you are on any browser, from Safari to Windows to Opera — any of them — all have spell checkers, usually somewhere in the “Language” section of the settings. My Google checker only works sporadically, possibly because when Grammarly is working, it decides to not bother. What I did count on from the WordPress spellchecker was for typos — sort of the “last outpost” before publishing.
I suppose this is truly a matter of semantics since all spell checkers are free, assuming you are working with some standard browser. I don’t think Grammarly works on a phone, by the way (I could be wrong), but there is probably something that does work.
Spring comes to the Blackstone Valley. It has nothing to do with spelling or checking, but it’s pretty and I thought we needed a few moments of pretty.
My real objection is that they do this stuff without ever consulting their customers — us — or even sending a note to tell us about the changes they have made so we don’t get ambushed.
There are a lot of people who want the spell checker back. It’s an open issue, but I don’t know if they are going to do it or not. I see their point, which is valid, but stupid because really, how much extra work was it to just leave the spell checker there? Not everyone is equally good at dealing with browser settings. In fact, many people aren’t entirely clear that there ARE browser settings.
Snowballs and the Mumford dam in “downtown Uxbridge.”
They do have an explanation in their huge folders full of information about WordPress. The problem is that although these explanations are good, many of them are old and based on everything from XP to Windows 10 and various versions of Safari and Android built in there too. It can be difficult to figure out which of these many choices is what you need for your equipment.
Since I already use Grammarly and I upgraded (still free, but with a few extra perks to include awkward grammar). The grammatical fixes both aggravate me and yet can also improve the phrase, so I never know whether I’m going to be annoyed or pleased.
Semantics indeed!
The little footbridge in the merry month of May by the dam on the Mumford
Anyway, Grammarly is free and it does handle punctuation better than spell checkers. We tend to be sloppy about punctuation, especially online. I know I use a lot of dots and dashes rather than correct punctuation. You can turn that part of it off. Actually, I had to make a separate installation to make that piece work and it is called “Ginger.” Also free.
However, the simplistic WordPress version is gone. Maybe they will put it back, maybe not. But it was intentionally removed.
The little canal along the Mumford
Wouldn’t it have been a nice touch to tell us? Not just do it, but inform us what’s going on?
Spelling isn’t usually the problem anyway. Most of us can spell reasonably well and can look it up in Google if we can’t. The problem is typos and repetitive statements from too much cutting and pasting — and leaving pieces behind.
So that’s it, kids.
We were ambushed. Again. But at least they fixed those settings and we urgently needed that particular fix.
Bird pictures are included for sanity reasons.
We need some. Birds are good for that.
Yesterday, after spending my entire day trying to make a breakthrough on WordPress — and feeling that maybe I had made a tiny dent — I realized that Amazon had sent me my package with the wrong stuff in it. It was almost the final straw, not counting that the software people have removed the spell-checker from the post writer.
The singing Carolina Wren
This must be one of their improvements, like when they removed the “edit” function from all posts once they were posted. When asked why they did that, they said why would anyone need it?
They restored it when about a million of us told them they had their heads up their asses and to please PUT THE EDIT BUTTON BACK. Some of us like to fix errors and even (gads!) rewrite awkward sentences or fix typos.
Downy Woodpecker
Do any of these people actually write a blog or post anything? Do they have any beta testers? Do they have any Omega testers or Alpha testers — or anyone who tests anything before they shove it down to us? They also seem to have removed the help button again. I guess too many of us used it and now they have to (gasp) fix stuff.
Or maybe not.
It’s hard to believe that anyone at WordPress gives a rat’s ass about their “customers.” No one has ever made me feel valued.
It’s a woodpecker, but I can’t see enough of him to know which one.
I’ve had it for the day. If you haven’t heard from me yet, I’ll try to get to you today, but we have a long funeral in Boston on Wednesday and I don’t think I’ll have time or energy to do much, after that, there’s Thursday. If I’m still mentally capable.
Is this a test? Do we get an “A” if we pass? A gold star? Something? Anything?
I’m sending this to everyone because I think maybe I stayed with WordPress long enough to get them to start fixing the problems that have been bugging everyone.
Please forgive the spacing issues. It another one of WordPress’s never repaired problems. Some days, it’s worse than others.
This was the final note:
Steve D. (Automattic)
May 6, 19:30 UTC
Hey there!
We had a live chat recently where you noticed the settings within the Reader appeared to broken. After some investigating and a discussion with developers, it seems there are quite a few things that need to be fixed. I’ve opened up an issue with them to have this fixed. We’ll reply here once we have more information.
Thanks again for your patience and understanding, and for bringing this to our attention. Let us know if you have any other questions in the meanwhile!
Best,
Steve D. Happiness Engineer
After Trent could not make a comment, though I did find both his comments in “spam” — usually I don’t find them at all — I went into my followers/manage/setting file to reset his link to me only to discover that the setting didn’t work. At all.
Click?
Nothing happened. I checked up and down the 75 blogs I follow (which is why I never seem to have time to actually keep up with everyone!) and all of the “settings” links were dead.
That was one bug over the line for me. These connection issues — the pingbacks that don’t ping or back, the comments that don’t work, the now you are connected, now you aren’t bug, not to mention the disappearing post notification issue and the “What happened to my followers?” problem … and I think and have said this before that ALL OF THESE PROBLEMS ARE CONNECTED.
They are not separate issues to be dealt with one at a time, but no one was listening.
Steve wasn’t listening either until he realized HIS settings weren’t working either. Suddenly, it was a bug. When he went to the developers, they said “Ooh, there are a LOT of bugs!” which of course is what we have all be saying for weeks, maybe months.
We have connection issues and I think it all goes back to the database which for at least two years has not been working as it should. The entire Reader is a mess of bugs.
What they have done is keep pushing forward without ever fixing the bugs they’ve left behind and they have accumulated and now, the problem is finally big enough for them to actually try and fix it.
You are welcome to send me congratulations. Cash would also help.
I just stayed on the line literally since I got up this morning. I refused to give up. Because no settings is not a little bug. It’s a really big one and you can’t work around it.
They were supposed to send me a transcript of the “chat” but for some reason, didn’t. All I can tell you for sure is that I really did my best and I hope something comes out of it. Because it is getting harder and harder to use this platform and sooner or later, any number of us will just give up.
I copied most of the relevant sections from the actual chat:
What’s a specific example of a setting on https://wordpress.com/following/manage that you’re unable to change? I want to see if I see the same problem on my end, but want to make sure I do exactly what you’re doing.
ALL of them. NONE of them are working. Up and down the page, the grey settings function is not working.
Ah, the button I’ve highlighted in this screenshot, yes? https:/1/cld.wthms.co/a3im2A
I can click on the green “Following” and IT works, but not the settings underneath.
Gotcha! okay. I can see not only the issue on your end but I notice on my own Reader, the settings button doesn’t do anything as well. Give me just a moment to do some more digging.
Ah, so it isn’t just me. That helps. If it’s more general, you can track it down (I hope).
Not just you! Definitely makes it something we can troubleshoot easier. Let me get a hold of a developer to take a look with us. Give me just a few minutes.
No problem. I live on this computer. At least we know there’s an actual
problem
Yup! Thanks for bringing it to our attention 🙂
I suppose you’ll get back to me? Hopefully, it will turn out that all of these weird connection issues are somehow linked. That would be fine. Not being able to adjust settings is a big deal, so sooner would be way better than later. At least we found the bug. No small thing, that. I’ve done a LOT of beta testing over the years. It went with writing manuals and other documentation. You could use more beta testers. Just saying. We can save developers a lot of time by finding bugs BEFORE users!
You’re definitely right 🙂 I just heard from the dev team who said they noticed some other odd things with the reader as well. I’m going to file this bug report for them now and I’ll contact you via email, where we can notify you once we have an update and a fix.
Thank you! I work at home, but I work.
Hey, me too 🙂
Ah, the Internet. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
The truth!
I shall await you. Meanwhile, I will tell all and sundry that finally, this is getting tracked down. It will make people REALLY happy!
😀
Closing down and thank you. I don’t have your name … what is it?
Steve!
Gotcha!
Have a good day! I’m going to send a follow-up email to make contact now, and we’ll reply in that thread once we know more. Thanks again for your patience and understanding!
Hey, if this gets fixed. that’s huge. Can I save this chat? I don’t see a link for that.
Yup! Once the chat is over, you’ll receive an entire transcript via email. You can also open a new one and the entire history should be here as well.
Great. Have a wonderful day!
You too!
The transcript didn’t show up. I copied this from the actual “chat” file and it’s not the whole thing, but I think it’s the most relevant pieces.
WordPress has a lot of issues, most of which they have never fixed and will never fix. Some months ago, my graphics gallery stopped working if any of the pictures included a caption. Sometimes, the gallery just doesn’t work at all and hangs the entire post. Sometimes, I lose the post in the process.
The text shows up in a different format that its designation. The spacing between paragraphs has always been a gamble. They change formatting so often it’s not unusual for your template to become obsolete while you are in the middle of writing a piece.
Landing Titmouse and Junco
Comments disappear entirely or show up days — and occasionally months — after you write them. Or never.
Pictures may or may not show up. The size in which they show up? It’s like playing craps with busted dice. Frequently, the intended picture isn’t in the post or a picture appears that was pulled from a sidebar or someone else’s post. Sometimes photos are much smaller or larger than designated — or appear as a straight line or a black box … or nothing.
They have a lot of text issues they’ve never addressed which is one of the many reasons I strongly objected to them floating a whole new version of text editing when they never managed to solve their previous problems.
Nuthatch
WordPress never repairs anything. Their “happiness engineers” mostly specialize in telling you it’s not a problem. It’s just that one day, half your followers disappeared because they don’t like you anymore.
“Overnight?” you ask.
They explain that you don’t write what people want to read, the implication is that the problem is not their dipsy database, but your writing.
They know this how?
They don’t know anything. What they really know is that they are not there to solve problems, but rather to explain why the problem is not their fault but yours.
Instead of fixing problems, they move on to “something different.” If the new format has issues, they won’t solve them. They will just move on to something else and you can follow … or not.
They don’t care about bloggers unless they are a business prospect. If you aren’t paying the highest price for a business site, they have no interest in you or whatever problems you have.
I’m tired of WordPress. Tired of their bad attitude and failure to realize that we, the writers and creative artists who built their brand are still the people who bring in business. Without us, people would only come to do business and most of their visiting population would be gone.
I’m paid up through 2019 but after that? I don’t know whether I want to continue. I love the friends I’ve made. I get good responses to my work, too. But it’s so difficult to work around the embedded issues that are always part of WordPress. I wonder if I will continue past this year. The main reason I keep going is my friends — who matter — and I’m retired and don’t have that many other things to do.
I love writing. Not answering questions or figuring out how many prompts I can stuff into a 200-word response.
I want to see WRITING. Something new, out of your or my head, using our own ideas.
The audience has changed, the concept of what blogging is has changed. We all used to write about what our world and what was happening. Now, it’s all prompts and “Question & Answer” stuff. Almost no one is writing about what matters to them.
Each day feels less like fun and more like work for which I don’t get paid. The bloom is off the rose.
Ultimately, I’m tired of the hassles of WordPress. They don’t care about us. No matter how brisk our stats show our response to be, they don’t care unless we are a business application. Why should I pay for a business plan when I don’t have a business?
Junco on a very cold morning
That’s the direction they are going. You, me, all of us who began blogging for the joy of writing or whatever our creative thing is are no longer valued. WordPress does not care. We aren’t making enough money for them. And it isn’t as if they are failing for lack of funding. They just aren’t getting as rich as Jeff Bezos.
If you think it’s bad now, it will be much worse in a year. If there was a viable alternative, I’d be there, but Blogger (Google) has its own issues every bit as bad as these and no reasonable way of directly responding to posts.
Whatever is wrong, you can bet it’s about money. No company wants to simply be profitable. They have to make enough money to rule the world. We are not part of that goal.
Big thank you to Martha Kennedy for spreading this around. These days, I don’t think I need it, but in case I change my mind, it’s nice to know that there’s somewhere to go for a rational explanation.
If you do a lot of complicated posting — especially if you are using cross-references and inserts from other texts, this might be exactly your thing. It’s similar to Framemaker, Adobe’s once premier text editing system, although not quite as intense (or huge) … but Frame was made for designing technical books with footnotes over multiple volumes with all appropriate indices.
This is not intended for that although, in theory, you could use it. I’d be interested to know how it works for you. Especially since Adobe abandoned Framemaker years ago. It was almost a thousand dollars for a single single-user purchase — updates cost less — more than a decade ago. Its audience shrunk, making keeping it up to date not worth the development time, or in any case, that’s what I assumed.
Adobe had stopped fixing the bugs a couple of years before they stopped selling it anyway and since it was THE tool for multi-volume documentation, maybe that’s why companies stopped writing documents? No software?
Good luck and have fun!
Can I address the elephant in the room?
WordPress doesn’t look like WordPress anymore.
The WordPress Gutenberg Editor has replaced the familiar WordPress Editor.
Welcome to the world of blocks! There are blocks available for all kinds of content: You can insert text, headings, images, lists, and lots more!
This post will explain why WordPress switched to the Gutenberg Editor and offer a tutorial so you know how to use the new WordPress editor.
Why Did WordPress Switch to the WordPress Gutenberg Editor?
Bloggers were using third parties to build landing pages.
For example, bloggers and other content creators were paying to use DragDropr to move around content.
My landing page for new subscribers is an example of content moved around on that page.
As you can see, my image block and my text block are next to each other. Using DragDropr, I arranged the blocks this way.
WordPress wanted to have this functionality. By adopting this feature and more, WordPress will continue to grow. That was the rationale.
(NOTE: Gutenberg was created to help grow the business aspect of WordPress and was not designed for “regular” bloggers. They admitted this to me. Not even professionals need such a complex text editor. The good news is IF you need it, it exists. Hopefully, it will still exist in another year. You can never tell with WordPress.)
How to Use the New Gutenberg WordPress Editor
Are you familiar with Medium.com? Medium, a publishing site, works in a similar manner to the WordPress Gutenberg Editor.
You add blocks with different parts of your blog post in them.
WordPress Gutenberg Tutorial:
Once you click “Add Post,” you see a series of blocks on your screen.
Add your title, your blog post graphic, and the text of your post where directed.
The WordPress Gutenberg editor is intuitive. You don’t need to click the plus sign to add a new block. Each time you hit enter, a new block will be created.
Should you want to add a new element, click the plus sign.
If you drag your cursor to the left of the block, you’ll bring up the edit functions.
Look at your options for elements to add. Although they’re listed by most commonly used, you may find additional elements intriguing. These may be elements you never thought to use until you saw them as an option to add in the WordPress Gutenberg Editor.
To add an Image:
Create a new block and click the Image icon.
Upload your image. Notice the alignment and edit choices are directly above the block for your convenience.
Use the handlebars on the sides of the image to alter the size. You can also just drag the sides of the photo until they’re the dimensions you want. Write the caption directly in the draft if desired.
Don’t forget to put your focus SEO keyword in the Alt Tag.
Alignment choices for setting your image to the right, left, or center will be available as well.
Many of these features were available in the Classic Editor but were not so obvious.
If you want to create a new heading, after creating a new block, click the T (for text).
After typing, you see you are given a choice for what type of heading you want to add.
Under the block, you see you have choices such as adding HTML code to the block or an Image.
Clicking the 3 dots will enable you to choose additional options.
Did you notice the Grammarly editor appeared? You can now edit individual blocks with Grammarly.
Once again, you can add new elements by clicking the plus sign.
You can add YouTube or Vimeo videos simply by pasting the link into the block.
You can add blockquotes as well.
Do you like to embed lists in your blog posts?
You can also add numbered lists or bulleted lists.
To add Custom HTML in the new WordPress editor:
When you click the plus sign in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, you’ll be able to search for HTML. Look: The Custom HTML Code option came up when I searched for it.
Look:
The new WordPress editor is intuitive. I don’t have to search for HTML code. It “knew” I commonly use the HTML code and it came right up the next time I needed it.
Since I paste codes for embedded elements and throw a linky party, I use HTML code pretty often, so this feature was important to me.
You can toggle between the HTML and the preview so you can see how your text will look.
Click “Preview” to load a preview of this page so you can make sure you’re happy with your blocks.
Finished writing? Just click “Publish” and you’re good to go.
If you need help, there is a WordPress Gutenberg tutorial video. You can see how to use the WordPress Gutenberg Editor.
Fair warning: The video was made a year ago when the editor was still in the beta testing stages.
Advantages of Using the WordPress Gutenberg Editor
You can move the blocks around.
Resize your image by moving the handlebars on the sides. Just drag your image to the size you want it.
You don’t need 3rd-party tools like DragDropr to build landing pages.
You don’t need 3rd party plugins like tables since the editor allows you to insert a table.
The option to enter an image comes in when you add a new block. Therefore, you don’t have to keep going to the top of the screen to add media.
You have more options now.
The options you had before are more obvious now.
Using the Gutenberg editor is like using Medium. If you can publish at Medium.com, you can easily publish using the new WordPress Gutenberg editor since Medium uses the same concept of blocks.
If you’re not happy, you can install a plugin that will put the previous WordPress editor on your site.
Disadvantages of Using WordPress Gutenberg Editor
Bloggers now have to learn a new skill: Mastering Gutenberg.
You can’t use the editor on your phone and you won’t be able to until 2019.
Wrapping Up: Features of The New WordPress Gutenberg Editor and Tutorial
This post explained
What Gutenberg is
Why WordPress switched to a new WordPress editor
How to use the WordPress Gutenberg Editor
The advantages and disadvantages of the new WordPress editor.
Your turn: What is your opinion of the WordPress Gutenberg editor? Are you used to it yet? What is your opinion?
Readers, please share so bloggers struggling to learn the WordPress Gutenberg Editor read this tutorial and learn how to use Gutenberg.
Sometimes complaining helps. All the people who complained that they can’t use the new format have been offered the option of retaining (forever, apparently) the “classic format.” I was up at the Forum and there were tens of thousands of complaints, mostly from long-term bloggers.
The thing is, there IS a Classic Editor plug-in, but you can’t use it unless you are a Business Plan user — which is a $25/month hit for retirees. Most of us really can’t afford much more than we already have.
I certainly can’t do it. Forget about the minor detail that I don’t have a business nor have I any plans for one. WordPress is going whole-hog for getting a lot more money. I guess they figure Google, Amazon, and Facebook are rolling in the big bucks, so why shouldn’t WordPress be rolling in it too?
WordPress is not hard up for money. They are earning more than enough, but in today’s world, there’s no such thing as enough money.
Greed is good.
Remember when “good” meant doing something kind and generous for someone else? Now “good” means getting it all for yourself and keeping it while making sure no one else gets any.
It’s an international trend. Not, I think, a healthy one.
But — just this once, WordPress is willing to offer anyone who asks for it (you have to go to the forum and complain officially, but they may make this available for everyone soon) the option to dump Gutenberg and keep the classic. They admitted there’s a strong possibility that even business users may not want such a complicated formatting app, so probably they will keep the classic format intact and let only those who prefer Gutenberg use it. The Forum shows an incredible number of complaints and I suspect I wasn’t the only one who said either I can use an application that makes sense in the context of what I really do, or I will finally give up.
They heard me.
So now, if I genuinely need an application this complicated, I will wait until it is properly tested and then do my own testing. See if it works for me. I’ve got a lot of stuff packed into this site.
WordPress’s search engine hasn’t been sturdy enough to deal with the thousands of photographs, images and 8,400 posts in the “old” format and the new one is worse.
Anyway, if you have somehow gotten yourself into the Gutenberg loop and you don’t like it, you can get out of it. For once — for the first and probably only time — WordPress heard us. I didn’t think it was possible.
WordPress was trying to impose Gutenberg on this site. Aside from it being full of bugs (which they are trying to fix, but they should have fixed them before releasing the application!), it’s an excessively complicated format for a blog. Maybe for designing a book, but this isn’t a book.
I’m not writing a book. I’m blogging. Gutenberg did a lot of things to this site that left me unable to blog.
I will not bore you with a list of issues, including the inability to properly format a photograph or for that matter, FIND a photograph to format.
Eventually, I discovered that you could use the Plugins function to reset it to the Classic Editor. Then I discovered you can’t use the PlugIn function unless you are on a business plan. I’ve been Premium for six years. I don’t have a business and never will and on top of that, we’re on Social Security and there’s no money to pay $25 a month to blog.
So I wrote to them. You can still get quick results if you figure out where to go. To be fair, I also begged because I could probably figure out the “new plan” but I don’t WANT that plan and Garry and Ellin, our two “not very tech savvy” writers, would never figure it out.
Also, seriously, how complicated do you need to make a blogging text format app?
So to actually get help:
1 – Go to WordPress.com
2 – Click the blue “help” button on the bottom right. Send an email with your issue.
In less than an hour, they had reset me to the classic editor. You see, the problem is that — aside from the bugs and there are more of them than I can count (not all of which affected me, mind you, but which mostly affected users like me with very big blogs — in other words, long-timers) — I quite literally begged them to fix this. He fixed it and dumped Gutenberg and now I’m back to the editor I have always used.
I was ready to pull the plug. It changed all the fonts on my headings and changed the size and formats of the headings. It wouldn’t call up any of my graphics or allow me to use former posts. I tried changing templates, and it was even worse. Chaos.
So they fixed me and they did it fast! As far as I can tell, they are promising to leave classic editor available indefinitely. That’s what they are saying because, as it turns out, the new format is way above the needs of most bloggers. I’ve even got “Copy a Post” back.
Sometimes, if you grovel, you get what you want. But not allowing plugins for anyone but business users doesn’t bode well for where WordPress is heading. They are going all out for bigger money, even though they are already making a lot of money. Apparently, not quite enough.
I went to take a look at the brand spanking new format for WordPress.
WARNING: If you do that, you will NOT be able to go back to your old format. I think what they have done is eliminate all the old versions of the editor we used, so you can use the new one, or hope they don’t delete the old ones entirely and leave you with this mess.
Which is what I think is really going to happen.
Now, there are things about the “new new new new editor” that may — eventually, when they get the bugs fixed — be useful. But right now? You can’t even get a set of standard editing functions across the top of your page.
They also (apparently, unless it’s a bug) have a limited number of categories — AND they no longer offer you the option of picking up an old post so you can rewrite it.
I’ve got nearly 8,000 posts, so yes, I go back and rewrite material. After you’ve been doing this for a long time, why not?
In this new format, I opened categories and it dies after the letter “C.” What happened to “D” through “Z”? You can’t even find the missing pieces by typing the category name in the search list. Nothing comes up. This will effectively lose thousands of posts and pictures.
I went through and deleted all the one I used very rarely. That got me all the way to “D.” When I eventually found my way back to the “classic editor,” all the deletes were not made.
NOTHING IN THAT SOFTWARE IS WORKING. NO ONE BETA TESTED IT. NO ONE.
I don’t object to change. I object to untested changes and buggy software. I pay to use WordPress. I object to being forced to do stuff the way they decree. If this is such a great interface (it might be POTENTIALLY, but it definitely isn’t there yet), then people will use it. You don’t have to club us over the head.
Also, they are no longer offering help to anyone but business users … so they’ve forced me to use this very buggy interface and there’s no one to talk to. Maybe this will finally push me over the edge.
You know that whole thing about this being a free country? Well … this kind reminds me that anyone who doesn’t follow orders is not free. What is wrong with having more than one interface? How does it hurt anyone?
A thing that happens as we age is we lose contact with pop culture. We retire. We don’t feel impelled to learn to do it differently unless there’s a really good reason to do it. Unless you’re paying me to do it your way, try not to get too bent out of shape if I prefer to do it my way. It may be different, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
We are happy with the way we do things. They are comfortable and trust me, retirement and comfortable go together like guitar and bass. It starts early, as early as ones 30s when you realize you don’t like the music. By your 40s, you don’t care who knows it and by fifty, you drop any pretense of caring any of “the latest things.”
It doesn’t mean that nothing new makes the cut, but I’ve been a writer my whole life and any product that requires me to access multiple pages to accomplish the same task that previously could be done on a single page is NOT an improvement. This is poorly designed software.
That’s right: it’s BAD SOFTWARE. That’s not how the pros do it, kids. I was one of them.
I’ve been reading about this upcoming new interface for a while. I really had my fingers crossed that just this once, WordPress would have the grace to fully test it and make sure it worked. It is not an UPGRADE if it’s harder to use than the old one — especially if the task is identical.
Drop down lists for everything? Dumping most of my categories? Completely changing how media is handled without so much as an introduction? Discovering that we no longer have access to help?
So, they did it again, but this is the worst yet. I’m wondering if it’s worth it. WordPress doesn’t want writers and photographers. They want business accounts.
I’m not a business. I am not selling anything. I’m trying to just enjoy life.
This isn’t going to be fun. It’s going to be a major league headache. They’ve been cutting down on what they offer “premium” users for years and at this point, nothing seems to be what they are offering. Platform, templates, and good luck. What they are clearly saying is simple.
WORDPRESS DOES NOT CARE ABOUT USERS.
You know how Sears is going out of business? Well … guess what? I’m pretty sure driving away all the people who do creative stuff which brings in new people is not going to help WordPress get richer (they are already making plenty of money) than they already are. But not to worry.
To participate in the Ragtag Daily Prompt, create a Pingback to your post, or copy and paste the link to your post into the comments. And while you’re there, why not check out some of the other posts too!
Be aware that if it changed on my blog, it’s likely to change on yours. Maybe not immediately, but eventually, so don’t be surprised when it occurs. I hoped it might be that specific template, but the same thing was true on every template I tried.
Hi there,
Thank you for contacting us.
Spell checkers are a specialty product, and it’s not something we specialize in. The WordPress.com spell checker was developed years ago when there didn’t exist any alternatives yet. Since then things have changed and a lot of other companies have started specializing in this, which led to the decision on our end to step back from the field and focus instead on the things we do specialize in.
Modern browsers now provide built-in spell-checking tools, so we have removed this feature from our product to avoid maintaining unnecessary dependencies. I read that you do not like Grammarly or Google’s spell checker, however, following are our recommendations as an alternative option:
You can read more about some of these options here – https://en.support.wordpress.com/proofreading/
Please let us know if you have any questions or if we can help with anything else.
Best,
A. Jay | Happiness Engineer
WordPress.com | Automattic Inc.
I’d be interested to find out in exactly what WordPress does specialize. Certainly not in helping bloggers do whatever bloggers do … or creating functional software for bloggers to use. They have been forging ahead with their preconceived notion of what we are supposed to want for years.
None of us were ever consulted. No user surveys were ever taken among users. So with each “update,” they make the software harder to use. More awkward, slower. Essentially, dumber.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. It certainly didn’t surprise me.