I Knew I Would Regret Switching to WordPress Sooner or Later

And here it is.

Suppose you were a young, healthy man or woman.  Suppose someone entered your life and fell in love with you and invited you to move in with them.  Suppose they got you everything: every meal, every snack, every drink.  Suppose they urged you to stay on the couch, relax, eat more, relax more, sleep in, sit down, lay down, take the car to the corner grocery store instead of walking.

Eventually, you will not know how to cook.  You will not be able to walk.  You will grow fat and sedentary and stupid.

You are now the ideal customer for Microsoft, and Apple, Google, and Facebook, and WordPress.

I initially signed on to WordPress because it was free and it was convenient.  And because I had to know it because part of my job was to provide technical support to other people who were using it to update websites for the organization I work for.

Yes, I fell for it: the fatty food on a tray in front of the TV.  But I didn’t mind it too much because it still required some work to actually create content, and format it the way you like.

But the other day, I was reading some of my older posts in HTML and thinking, gee, I like the look of that.  It’s more real, more raw, less slick, and has more character than the stupid standard WordPress fonts and formatting.  I had already decided to go back to my html editor and my rather primitive looking but content-focused webpages.

And then, the update to WordPress came, and I wasn’t paying close attention, and suddenly this stupid fucking new “Gutenberg” editor appear out of nowhere, with no option to turn it off.  And suddenly my editing screen was a kludge of stupid options I had no interest in, blocking me from actually putting in the content I wanted to put in.

Gutenberg is an addition to the WordPress platform that will transform the way websites and content is displayed through a series of customizable blocks. This will allow users the flexibility to control the way their content appears on the page and create an easier building experience for anyone looking to create a website.  Some credulous tech blogger somewhere

WordPress, joining Microsoft in it’s perverse and pernicious determination to make everybody as absolutely stupid as possible, has removed the normal editor from current editions of WordPress and replaced it with an idiotic contraption intended to make it easy for idiots to drag and drop multi-media crap into their own webpages so that they have glorious content without actually providing any glorious content.  Just steal it.  Just let WordPress automatically format everything so that you lose any ability to control what your page looks like.  Your page is going to look like a million other pages.

The new editor also allows for developers to create guard rails so to speak that will guide content editors to their intended goals. Imagine that it is similar to the bumpers that are used to improve your performance when bowling.  The same credulous tech blogger.

The ability to actually see and make changes to your blog on the go – or even post a blog with custom features from your phone is just one of the many updates Gutenberg will bring to WordPress. Text pasted from Word or Google Docs will get cleaned up and converted to blocks automatically and instantly.

Seriously?  The blogger is suggesting that bumper pads at a bowling alley are what we all need.

Can anything worth reading be written on a cell phone?  Seriously?  Are you going to dictate it to “hey Google” and let the master geniuses at Google clean up your text (and censor it)?  You want the NSA to be able to scan your blogs before you even upload them?  (I know that sounds “paranoid”: the idea that such a thing sounds “paranoid” is the U.S. intelligence gathering community’s best friend).

Yes, let’s all go bowling.  There are your bumper pads.  Enjoy yourself.