The Words…… I’ve been back on WordPress for five months and things have changed from three years ago.
There is significantly more selling and WordPress is not user-friendly if you’re using blocks.
Work required me to regularly learn new technologies. While miserable for a stretch of time, it forces a person to acclimate, eventually becoming rather adept at countless software programs, new platforms, and I even had to do some web development.
When I started preparing my blog relaunch, I assumed “everyone” must have converted their classic websites to blocks. Boy, was I wrong. The years-long bloggers I follow nearly all use classic. Those also-wonderful writers I follow that are using blocks? They are simple themes and I understand why. I toiled putting this basic site together!
If you search the archives of my blog or find older posts via Related Posts, you might hit an article that hasn’t yet been converted to blocks. Why? Because one of my many emails to the happiness engineers received the disappointing response that conversion requires one-by-one, manual changes.
I was initially fine with this task, as I decided wholeheartedly to resume blogging. What I didn’t expect was once I set the theme, started converting, then changed my theme, 300 posts automatically changed as well. Not back to classic, but into some margin-messed up mess. Photos were enlarged and blurry.
The featured image was an entirely frustrating experience all on its own. There is more to say, but I suspect you have your own laundry list of WP annoyances.
The Photos….. After weeks of frustration, I enlisted help. A tech friend sat for quite some time before announcing, “This is massive. It’s going to take you weeks and weeks and weeks to gain any proficiency.” I squawked, “I’ve already worked for weeks and weeks!”
I finally just decided to launch, despite the imperfections and less-than pretty homepage. Thinking the worst was behind me, I downloaded the WP app. Surprise! The WP app is virtually useless – they themselves announcing users should download Jetpack.
No problem. I downloaded Jetpack to discover a host of new issues. When using the reader in the Jetpack app, some authors make you click a link to read their entire post. When clicked, it requires you log into WP. When I log in, it kicks me out, preventing me from accessing their site, reading the full post or liking/commenting. I can’t be alone experiencing this bizarre Jetpack glitch. This appears, followed by the kick back to Jetpack:
In summary….
I cringe thinking about the wasted earthly time waiting on Jetpack and keeping up with the ongoing WordPress changes.
I don’t believe WP seeks to frustrate their users. Their happiness-techs no doubt find my questions laughable. Maybe that’s why it takes a week for them to respond. I do believe WP upsells at every turn. They have repeatedly suggested that I purchase a plugin (or several) and hire one of their engineers to work on my site.
I have plenty more to learn and master about WP and JP. I’m also confident that both applications make using this platform far more complex than either need to be. Just my subjective blogger opinion😉.
Thank you for reading! MLM
Tales from a Mid-Lifer 
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