#oneaday Day 126: What is WordPress doing?

You may recall a little while back I had an issue with my WordPress.com blog, the original incarnation of this site. The site’s “automated anti-spam” system had flagged my blog and taken it offline. I hasten to add that there is, of course, no spam or any other sort of inappropriate, objectionable or illegal content either on the original form of this site or this present incarnation. It was a mistake on their part, brought about by WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic increasingly relying on “AI” (spit) for more and more of their functionality.

This was the first time I’d had an issue with WordPress.com since joining in 2006. But it was serious enough that it made me move my site over to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation, which is what you’re reading right now.

For those unfamiliar with the distinction, WordPress.com is a free-with-paid-options blogging service where you can set up a blog or other website quickly and easily. Its free offering has gradually gotten worse over the years, now placing a rather obtrusive “Made with WordPress” banner on new sites created, but for the most part, I’ve always been satisfied with it for my purposes, particularly because, having been a user for so long, I had been “grandfathered” in to not having things like that banner ad.

WordPress.org, meanwhile, is an open-source project that maintains WordPress itself, which is a content management system and blogging platform you can install on any website. The main distinction is that WordPress.com is a service provided to you, while WordPress.org is both a piece of Web-based software and the community surrounding it. And one of the key differences is that while with WordPress.com, you’re stuck with preset configurations unless you pay through the nose for their extortionate “Business” plan, with WordPress.org you can tinker with and customise the core software as you see fit, either by fiddling with the code yourself, or by installing plugins.

I was dismayed to see how much “AI” rot had infested WordPress.com, and it made me no longer want to associate with the platform. Now, it seems, there is trouble with WordPress.org too, as reported by the excellent tech blog 404 Media.

I have not followed this whole saga, but it seems Automattic is having a bit of a spat with a company called “WP Engine”, which is a service that hosts websites built using WordPress. Apparently Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg branded WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress” and complained about them and their investors not contributing “sufficiently” to the open source project, and that WP Engine’s use of the “WP” brand might confuse users into thinking it is an official WordPress thing.

I can sort of see his point on that last thing — though WP Engine maintains their usage is covered by fair use — but this whole thing appears to escalated beyond reasonable proportion at this point. WP Engine sent Automattic a cease and desist letter telling Mullenweg to stop having a tantrum, and Mullenweg responded with what he calls a “scorched Earth nuclear approach”, sending his own cease and desist letter to WP Engine.

It didn’t stop there. Mullenweg banned WP Engine from accessing resources on WordPress.org, including, among other things, the plugin directory and the ability to automatically update plugins and themes. Not only that, he has raised a significant number of eyebrows by adding a peculiar checkbox to the WordPress.org login page, asking users to confirm that they are “not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise”.

This, of course, has had people asking what the consequences are for not ticking that box. And it seems a few individuals who have been longtime contributors to the WordPress.org project have been banned from the community simply for asking “what the hell, bro?”, to paraphrase.

This is concerning. Not being able to access the WordPress.org community doesn’t preclude anyone from building their site using the WordPress.org software, but it is a problem for those who have been helping to maintain and update it. On top of that, some contributors are quite reasonably concerned about potential legal repercussions if they do not tick the box, believing Mullenweg to be just that petty.

My simple question is… well, it’s “what the hell, bro?”

WordPress, in both its .com and .org incarnations, powers a significant chunk of the modern Web. And while blogs have somewhat fallen out of favour since the rise of social media, there are still thriving communities of both WordPress.com and WordPress.org bloggers regularly posting — and who, more to the point, likely have a significant body of work hosted on some form of WordPress derivative at this point, which it will be a pain to move somewhere else.

It’s depressing to see both incarnations of WordPress fall foul of enshittification and CEO arrogance. Because that’s what this is. Whether it’s the AI garbage being rammed into WordPress.com or whatever the fuck Mullenweg thinks he’s doing with WordPress.org right now, the WordPress name is being dragged through the mud right now. And that’s unfortunate because, AI garbage aside, WordPress is still a great product.

I hope this situation is resolved sooner rather than later. And in the meantime, if you’re still blogging on WordPress.com, you might want to pop into your Site Settings menu and tick this checkbox just so your blog isn’t scraped for AI shite.

This site is staying where it is and in the incarnation it presently has for the moment. I really hope I don’t have to migrate again, and that I can go back to recommending WordPress like I always used to. Right now, though, Automattic is a company I would advise most folks to avoid like the plague.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 111: New URL, who dis

Hello! And welcome to the all-new incarnation of I’m Not Doctor Who, which can now be found at https://imnotdoctorwho.moegamer.net instead of its previous WordPress.com incarnation. (The old site is still there for archival/linking purposes, but all new updates will now be over here.)

Why did I do this? I think you know why, if you’re a regular follower, anyway. After Automattic’s dumbass automated “anti-spam” systems mistakenly flagged my blog and simply nuked it (albeit temporarily) rather than attempting to contact me in any way, I became somewhat concerned as to the “security” of the memories I have stored on this here blog. 17+ years of them, to be exact, and it would be a real pisser to lose them. Because while this blog is and always has been an unfocused mess with no real purpose other than to be a scratch pad for me to write whatever I feel like, it’s mine, and having some idiotic undoubtedly “AI” (ugh) powered bot potentially take it away from me at a moment’s notice without even telling me made me feel like it was probably time I took better ownership of it.

So here we are, on a shiny new subdomain of moegamer.net, my gaming website. I think most of the important stuff has transferred over now, though not without fighting WordPress’ terrible import function and the fact that no website on the Internet, including WordPress themselves, actually hosts up-to-date information on how to perform the export and import function correctly. Consequently, there may be a few broken images here and there, so please feel free to let me know if you spot any and I’ll attempt to fix them.

The incident earlier in the week highlighted how important this site is to me, though. Not only has it played host to two sets of daily ramblings in the form of the #oneaday blogs, it also includes several creative writing projects of varying degrees of finishedness, photographs, memories of dearly departed pets, and all manner of other things. It has also helped me survive several incredibly tough periods of my life.

The more I thought about it while the site was down the other day, the angrier I felt that it had just been snatched from me without warning — and, I reiterate, without me having done anything wrong. This was entirely on WordPress’ parent company Automattic, who are going in hard on “AI” bullshit at the moment. And so while this site is still running on the WordPress software, it is no longer running on Automattic’s platform, meaning I am not beholden to the whims of their automated shit machines going voonkarankachank and nuking any blogs they feel like without having the courtesy to contact the authors first.

So that’s that. Welcome, I guess. And let’s see where things go from here!

#oneaday Day 55: Do Not Turn AI On Without Asking Me

Partway through writing the previous post, I was surprised to see a weird yellow underline appear under one of the words I’d used. I hovered over it and was horrified to see the symbol no-one wants to see pop up, completely unasked for and unbidden. It seems that Automattic, makers of WordPress and specifically the JetPack plugin that handles things like social sharing and search engine optimisation, have been sneaking in an “AI Assistant” without anyone asking for it.

And I really haven’t asked for it, because I saw it pop up in the sidebar a few months back and immediately turned it off in the options. See:

And yet turning it off in there has not made it go away. Because this shit is still here:

I do not want this. I did not ask for this. I specifically turned this off and it’s still fucking there. And you can guarantee with that “Available Requests” counter at the bottom, they’re going to try and sell me a subscription plan to get more “credits” for their stupid pointless pile of crap feature.

I am not the only one who feels this way. And the fact that comments are closed on WordPress’ blog announcing this garbage feature speaks volumes.

A recent study published by the Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management suggests that the terms “AI” or “artificial intelligence” are proving a turnoff to users.

“When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust,” said the lead author Mesut Cicek. “We found emotional trust plays a critical role in how consumers perceive AI-powered products.”

The study is mostly around purchasing decisions rather than just generally using services, but the point stands: people see “AI” in something these days, and unless they’re an insufferable Silicon Valley-poisoned techbro, they are immediately switched off by it. Social network Bluesky recently announced that they were partnering with social analytics and scheduling platform Buffer, and the response was universally negative not because Buffer is a particularly bad service on the whole — I’ve used it in the past — but because they, like so many other tech companies right now, have shoehorned in an “AI Assistant” when no-one wanted one.

No-one wants this. Stop trying to make AI happen. It’s not going to happen.

I’ve long recommended WordPress as a great platform for folks who want to build a regularly updated website without getting too deep into the nitty gritty of web dev. But forcing AI on people may cause me to rethink that somewhat.

I wouldn’t mind it being there if it was opt-in, and one could ignore it. But it is not. It is turned on by default. And you can’t make it completely go away, only stop it being quite as annoying.

I cannot wait for this AI “gold rush” to be over. It is infesting everything even vaguely tech-related right now, including services that, as noted, I would previously have recommended without any reservations whatsoever.

Fuck off, AI. As a large language model, you are ill-equipped to receive my fist up your arsehole, but you’re going to anyway.

#oneaday Day 45: Happy Wordiversary

Apparently, according to my notifications anyway, today is the 16th anniversary of me signing up on WordPress.com. Indeed, looking back at my very first post it does seem that I started blogging on here on July 22, 2008.

Back in those days, I posted sporadically. I wasn’t really sure what to do with a blog at the time, I just felt like I wanted one. It actually wasn’t the first blog I’d had, either, although it’s the only one that’s survived this long.

I did, at one point, post an anonymous “Tales from the Staffroom” blog on BlogSpot that recounted my experiences as a classroom teacher, but there appears to be no trace of that left on the current Internet. There is an archive of it from as recently as 2023, but Google appears to have gone on a “Blogger purge” at some point in the last year, so the address no longer works on the current Web. This is a shame, but at least archive.org caught it before it disappeared.

At the time I started this blog, I was still working at the Apple Store as a “Creative” — that is to say, I was one of the people whose job it was to provide training sessions for Mac users on the use of creative software. Technically our job was supposed to be confined to lessons on Apple software only, but we inevitably found ourselves having to deal with customers using all manner of weird and wonderful pieces of software for their very specific needs.

This was partly our own fault — one guy on the Creative team was a Photoshop expert, so him happily covering that set the expectation with customers that we should all be able to cover Photoshop, even though several of us had specialisms in other areas — but also it just felt a bit mean to have someone just turn up, ask for help (which, nine times out of ten, was pretty simple, given that most folks who signed up for the “One to One” programme were new Mac users and often elderly) and tell them “no”.

I enjoyed that job for quite a while. I had a nice group of friends and I was good at it. The pay was… all right, considering it was a retail position, and the freebies and staff discounts were excellent. Unfortunately it ended badly when the management of the store inexplicably went into something of a decline and started being unnecessarily harsh on the folks working for them. I ended up losing my job after standing up for a colleague of mine who absolutely was unfairly dismissed, but given that both management and the folks above them closed ranks, he was never going to get fair treatment. And, as it turned out, I didn’t, either. Thankfully, I resigned before they could fire me, but it left an extremely bitter taste in my mouth with regards to all things Apple.

Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on that too much because that’s probably a whole other story I can tell another day. That was the context in which I was writing those first posts, though: I was, for a time, genuinely quite happy and satisfied with the way things were going. My life perhaps wasn’t proceeding in the direction I had initially intended — after a nervous breakdown, I decided that classroom teaching really wasn’t for me — but it was proceeding, at least. And having a blog was a nice breezy way to ponder on all sorts of things without any sort of real “pressure”. I can’t even remember if I’d joined Facebook or Twitter in 2008; I think I probably had, but social media certainly wasn’t the all-encompassing force of shittiness that it is today back then.

It’s interesting to look back and see things that no longer exist, such as PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, where you earned experience points and other RPG-style benefits for simply browsing the Web. And it’s also gratifying to see that so far as my tastes are concerned, some things never change.

You are, of course, always welcome to browse back into the archives via the dropdown in the sidebar. (I’m not sure where it is on mobile, probably at the bottom?) I’m not the same person I was back then — but every experience I’ve had, everything I’ve written about, has helped make me who I am today, for better or worse.

2286: Disappointment

This post is a response to WordPress’ “Daily Post” writing prompt for today.

My immediate reaction to the word “disappointment” when seeing today’s writing prompt was… well, disappointment in The Daily Post’s prompts of late.

Longtime readers may recall my occasional use of The Daily Post’s writing prompts and the fact that they led to some interesting explorations of topics I might not normally explore on this blog. My default go-to topics for writing about are video games, games journalism and mental health issues, but the prompts from The Daily Post gave me a nudge to consider other topics now and again, whether they be nostalgic, hypothetical or just plain weird.

Lately, though, the prompts on the site have just been single words, and these don’t inspire me nearly as much as the questions or phrases that used to make up The Daily Post’s bank of writing prompts. I’m trying to pin down exactly why the change to this style of prompt fills me with such disappointment, and I think it’s because it provides the opportunity for too broad a range of things to write about; single-word prompts are too flexible.

Let me explain what I mean. When I decide to make use of a writing prompt for a day’s post, I like it being in the form of a question or an exam-style “Phrase. Discuss.” prompt because it provides some sort of direction to the writing. Creativity is, to me, at its most interesting when you work within some sort of constraint, because you then have to not only use your creativity to produce the work itself, but you also have to use your creativity to perhaps bend the rules of the constraint in question, too. A single word doesn’t constrain me at all; I can still pretty much write about anything tangentially related to, say, “disappointment”, and I’ve technically fulfilled the brief. That, to me, isn’t a helpful writing prompt. That, to me, makes me feel like I should have just started writing any old thing off the top of my head rather than looking for a prompt.

I’m aware that my experiences and feelings about this aren’t going to be the same as everyone else’s, and that there are doubtless plenty of bloggers out there who relish the chance to tackle the challenge of a single-word prompt and make it interesting. But for me, I always found The Daily Post much more enjoyable when it provided much clearer briefs and prompts on what to write about — and much more interesting to see how other people interpreted these briefs, too.

Hopefully we’ll see a return to form for The Daily Post at some point in the near future. If not, well, I may have to contemplate setting up something of my own. I can’t be the only one feeling disappointment in this way!

2212: The Stat Connection

“Go to your Stats page and check your top 3-5 posts. Why do you think they’ve been successful? Find the connection between them, and write about it.”

Daily Post, February 9, 2016

All right. Let’s have a look, then. Since we’re not that far into 2016 and WordPress doesn’t appear to have an “all time” function to search top posts, I’ll provide the top five posts (excluding the homepage, which makes up the majority of pageviews but doesn’t tell me much) for both 2016 so far and 2015. In other words, these are posts that people saw the title of (probably on social media or via a search engine) and directly clicked through to, rather than simply checking my front page each day.

Here’s 2016 so far:

And here’s 2015:

All right. So let’s get analysing.

Since I write about a wide variety of topics on this blog — regular readers will know that it’s my personal outlet for venting about whatever is on my mind on any given day rather than any attempt to provide a coherent editorial experience — it’s perhaps not surprising that not all of the entries in these two lists have something in common, but there are a few common themes along the way.

How to Do Stuff

Let’s look at 2016, first. Both How to Win at Omega Quintet and Helping your Squad in Xenoblade X were written in 2015 (indicated by them not having the orange bar next to them), yet have remained consistently popular since I wrote them. The reason for this is that they are instructional content: guides for video games. Instructions or guides are consistent traffic magnets, regardless of the subject matter of your site, because one of the most common things people search the Internet for is how to do something. Video games sites often use guide content for current popular games to attract visitors to their site and guarantee a baseline of ad revenue, then cross their fingers that readers will click through to other, less “baity” content. It doesn’t always work like that, of course, which is why we’ve seen a rise in deliberately provocative “clickbait” content across the board, not just in games journalism.

Anyway. The reason that my guide content for both Omega Quintet and Xenoblade X proved popular is that these were both games that had a specific audience, but neither of them were “big” enough for a commercial site to want to devote time and column inches to them. In other words, those searching for help when playing Omega Quintet and/or Xenoblade X would be out of luck when searching the big video games sites, but a cursory Google search would doubtless throw up my posts here fairly early on — indeed, at the time of writing, my post on Omega Quintet appears sixth in my (admittedly personalised) Google search results, embarrassingly with a typo in the preview text which I have now corrected:

It’s for this reason that a couple of my other previous posts have proven popular over time: my post on How to Play Pocket Academy, for example, detailing the baffling and frankly illogical mechanics of Kairosoft’s mobile-based school sim, rode high in my rankings for quite some time. I tell you: if you want traffic, write posts that tell people how to do stuff, and preferably how to do stuff that mainstream sites haven’t covered.

The Power of Sharing

My most popular posts are always several orders of magnitude more popular than their nearest rivals, with perhaps the most impressive example being 2015’s An Open Letter to Paul Glass, Slimming World Consultant, Upper Shirley. This post was pretty far from my more regular subject matter on popular media, particularly video games, and yet it was my most popular individual post for 2015. Why? Because it had the absolute shit shared out of it.

Paul Glass was the consultant at our local Slimming World group when I first joined, and his enthusiasm and belief in the programme was and is a big part of why I’ve stuck with it and had so much success over the course of the last year — I’ve lost six stone in a year, hopefully with more still to come off. When he revealed that he would be leaving the group to spend more time with his family in far-off climes, I felt it important to express my feelings about what he had helped me accomplish in such a way that I could be clearly understood. I’m shy and socially anxious by nature, and at the time I wrote this I’m not sure how confident I would have felt saying all those words in person, but writing them down on paper is no big deal: I can “fire and forget” that way.

Something told me that I should probably share this post a little wider than just my Twitter followers, though, and so I decided to make one of my extremely irregular visits to Facebook to post a link to the letter on the Facebook group for the Slimming World group in question. That one simple action caused that one single post to absolutely explode in popularity, as it was shared by group members, Paul himself, and subsequently by other people I’d never met involved with Slimming World in various capacities, either as group members or staff.

You never can quite tell what the next big viral sensation is going to be, but there is one thing that all my popular posts do tend to have in common:

The Passion of the Post

It is, I feel, no coincidence that my most widely shared, most popular posts are those in which I feel most passionate about the things that I am writing about. I am a person who, I feel, can express their passion for something pretty clearly through my writing. And indeed, due to the aforementioned shyness and social anxiety mentioned above, I find writing to be the easiest means through which I can express that passion to an audience that can — hopefully — appreciate what I’m saying, or at least respect it.

2015’s most popular posts were all about passion, from my letter to Paul to Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games. Four out of the five posts above were about video games — four out of the five posts were pretty much about the same thing, in fact, which was critics’ regular dismissive and unfair treatment of both Japanese game developers and the fans of the games they make — but these posts all resonated deeply both with myself and with the circle of friends I’ve cultivated on social media, most of whom share the same interests as me.

Consequently, much as my letter to Paul got shared far and wide, so too did The Joyless Wankers of the Games Press (actually written the year before in response to an absolutely atrocious review of Fairy Fencer F on my former stomping grounds of USgamer), Some Thoughts for Critics (a response to Jim Sterling’s dreadful and ill-informed review of Senran Kagura 2), Hi Games Journalism, It’s Time We Had Another Chat (a response to Mike Diver’s equally dreadful and ill-informed review of Senran Kagura 2, a game which is a ton of fun but which proved to be a whipping boy for self-described “progressive” types on the grounds of the female characters’ big jiggly breasts) and the aforementioned Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games (a response to an extraordinarily narrow-minded editorial on USgamer by my former editor Jeremy Parish, and almost certainly the reason he has me blocked on Twitter). I saw these posts get shared and reshared, not only on Twitter, but also on Facebook and Reddit, the latter of which I don’t really use myself.

The things I had written had clearly got the strength of my feelings across, and other people felt like they could relate to them in some way — either agreeing or disagreeing — and this caused them to explode in popularity, at least in terms of numbers. The same, too, can be said for 2016’s Why It Would Be A Mistake to Not Localise Valkyrie Drive Bhikkuni, an impassioned plea for the progressive loudmouths not to stop Senran Kagura creator Kenichiro Takaki’s new game making it over to Western shores.

Bovril?

I’ll be honest, I have no idea why a post from 2013 about beef-and-yeast-extract black sticky substance Bovril is my third most popular post this year so far, but oddly enough this post has been consistently popular: it finished 2015 in sixth place, just after my various rants at the games journalism industry and also ranked sixth in 2014, but only managed 19th place in its original year of publication.

It’s not even a particularly exciting post: it simply describes what Bovril is and how I feel about it. It doesn’t even appear on the front page of Google results for Bovril. But I guess it meant something to someone somewhere. Perhaps not many people write about Bovril on the Internet, and my post offered a safe space for Bovril fans to convene and share in silent contemplation of salty beef drinks. Or perhaps it’s just one of those things that can’t quite be explained.

So what can we learn from this?

There are a few things you can probably see my most popular posts have in common. To my eye, these things are:

A clear, conversational title that makes it clear what the post is about — i.e. a simple subject line rather than a “title” that tries to be clever or funny
Passion for the subject — clear emotion, either positive or negative, is infectious and relatable
Scope for sharing — be it a topic that a lot of people feel strongly about, or something that is written in such a way that presents a strong argument in favour of or against something
Complete honesty — even at the expense of a few “bridges” if necessary
Instructions on how to do stuff — particularly if nowhere else has published instructions on how to do that stuff

Not all of my most popular posts have all of the above elements — although I do make a specific effort to apply the “complete honesty” element to everything I write — but these are, by far, the most common factors that all of my most popular posts have between them.

I hope that’s proved as enlightening for you as it has for me: it’s certainly given me some food for thought with regard to what to write about going forward from here, so I’d say both as a writing exercise and an analytical investigation, this post has been a great success.

Thanks, Daily Post!

2197: Putting the New WordPress App Through its Paces

I was helpfully informed by my WordPress dashboard that there’s a new WordPress app available for the desktop, so I figured I’d put it through its paces. I’ve used the mobile app for both iOS and Android a fair bit, so I was interested to see what benefit — if any — making use of a desktop app would have over just loading the site up in Chrome and making use of it.

Well… frankly, there’s not a huge number of benefits, at least not for those who primarily make use of blogs hosted on WordPress.com. The main benefit is that the app contains the whole of the main “new-style” WordPress dashboard in local format, meaning that you can theoretically 1) use it offline and 2) write without the distractions of other browser tabs. It’s also responsive to the window size, so you can scale the display according to what, exactly, you want to do with it: do you want to keep an eye on notifications, or do you want to write a full-on post?

You’ll notice I pointed out that it makes use of the “new-style” WordPress dashboard, and that’s an important distinction to make, because the new-style WordPress dashboard is emphatically not the same as the traditional wp-admin view. It’s a lot simpler and cleaner, sure, and you can do most of the things you can do in wp-admin in the new dashboard, but there are, frankly, a number of issues that WordPress so far hasn’t fixed with the main site that remain — and arguably are even more prominent — in the app.

Most notably, there are a significant number of flaws in what WordPress refers to as the “improved posting experience”. Having been using this a fair amount since my initial reactions to it, I’ve noticed that there have been a fair few improvements and additional functions added so that now it is, roughly speaking, in line with the wp-admin-based editor. There are still some irritating factors, however, chief among them (for me) being the fact that even with the window at 1920×1080, the word counter is scrolled off the bottom of the screen so I have to manually scroll down to view it — sometimes even if my post is longer than a screen in height. This is just plain bad design, and seems to have been fixed in the Web-based editor through the use of a floating word count window in the lower right of the viewport. Apparently the locally stored version of the editor page used in the app hasn’t taken this particular update on board, however; as I type this, my word count is once again disappearing out of the bottom of the viewport.

Another big flaw that requires less discussion is the fact that the Insert Hyperlink option does not include the option that the wp-admin-based editor does to search through your previous posts and link to them without having to look up the URL yourself. The absence of this from the “improved” posting experience is mildly irritating, and I have to wonder exactly why it was removed, since this is the exact opposite of an “improvement”.

A few things do seem to work a little better in the standalone app, mind; when using the editor in Chrome, I’ve found that sometimes the cursor keys and modifiers behave in somewhat strange and unpredictable manners: sometimes attempting to move to the previous character or word with keyboard shortcuts inexplicably jumps to the end of the paragraph or somewhere completely unexpected, particularly if there a few different items of formatting (such as links or italics) used in a paragraph. So far, at the time of writing, as I type this, I’ve encountered no such issues — that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not there, but they shouldn’t really be in there in the first place, so I’ve tended to assume they’re a Chrome issue rather than a WordPress issue.

Since I originally looked at the “improved posting experience”, too, I was pleased to discover that drag-and-drop images now work as they should: in other words, you can drag an image directly into the editor window and have it appear where the cursor was, rather than this simply being a shortcut to opening the “Add Media” window. So good job there!

Elsewhere in the app, you have access to the other features the WordPress dashboard offers, most notably site statistics and insights, allowing you to see at a glance how your most recent posts have been performing, which days you’ve been posting on and suchlike. The WordPress Reader system is also integrated into the app, allowing you to catch up on WordPress blogs you’ve subscribed to all in one place rather than having to remember to visit a bunch of sites. This is a helpful feature, but like everything else in the app, I’m not entirely convinced of the benefit of having it in a standalone app rather than just visiting the WordPress site in my browser.

All in all, then, the main benefit of the new desktop app appears to be little more than speed and a slightly more stable experience than the website under Chrome appears to offer. I suppose offline use is a benefit to those who are composing blog posts on the go using a laptop — or, indeed, catching up on downloaded Reader posts — but for me, this is some minor, not especially useful functionality, since I tend to compose my blog posts immediately before publishing them, which tends to mean that I have a stable Internet connection wherever I happen to be at the time.

I’ll continue using the app for a while and see how I get on with it. If nothing else, its “distraction-free” nature due to its lack of browser tabs is quite pleasant, so it may prove to be a helpful way to concentrate, whether it’s on my daily blogging “duties” or more substantial projects.

You can find out more about the app and download it for free here.

2031: Delayed Contact

How would you get along with your sibling(s), parent(s), or any other person you’ve known for a long time — if you only met them for the first time today?

WordPress Daily Post, August 12, 2015

This is an interesting question! What it’s really asking, I guess, is how I’ve changed over the years. And I’m certainly not going to deny that I’ve changed over the years — in some ways for the better, in other ways for the worse.

Let’s consider the “big things” first. The first thing I’d want to address is my depression and anxiety. As anyone who has had a depressed or anxious friend will know, we can be a handful: prone to bouts of irrational emotion, having a tendency to back out of appointments and commitments because we’re not feeling up to dealing with people, in some cases full of seething rage or unbearable grief at nothing in particular, which is difficult for anyone not living it to truly understand.

Now, I address this because I tend to think of my depression and anxiety as a “recent” thing, though on reflection it’s something I’ve clearly been carrying around with me for a lot longer than I might have initially thought. It probably stretches all the way back to primary school, to be honest, when I was, yes, full of seething rage at nothing in particular and would often get into trouble at lunchtimes and breaktimes for the 10 year old equivalent of casting “Provoke” on a dinner lady or school bully.

Actually, to say said seething rage was at nothing in particular isn’t quite accurate. It was something of a vicious cycle. I wasn’t comfortable in who I was, and kids being kids would pick on me, sensing weakness. I’d then be upset — particularly when, as often happened, my friends abandoned me and sided with the “cool” kids (who were often also the bullies of the playground) rather than with me.

But this isn’t specifically about my history with depression, it’s about whether people I’ve known for a long time would get along with me — or if I’d get along with them — if we happened to meet for the first time today. And the depression and anxiety side of things is interesting to consider; these days, I’m a lot more open and honest about talking about it in most circumstances — sometimes needing a bit of a prompt or leading question — whereas in my childhood and adolescence, when, in retrospect, I was clearly suffering from both of these issues, I didn’t recognise them for what they were and consequently didn’t know how to deal with them. My first girlfriend even left me because she “couldn’t take my moods” — though she did also cheat on me at the school prom, so fuck her, basically.

I digress, but the point, I guess, is that anyone I met for the first time now would have to be able to deal with someone who is aware of their own mental defects, be willing to support them when necessary and be willing to leave them the fuck alone when they need to be alone.

Now, onto other matters also worthy of consideration. Let’s keep things self-deprecating and consider my personal appearance. At school I was fairly unremarkable-looking, though I had terrible hair (still do), bad skin (still do) and zits (thankfully long gone). I felt like I was a bit fat at school compared to some of my friends, but looking back at some old photographs, I really, really wasn’t. I steadily gained weight over the course of my time at university and beyond until I got to the point where I was so uncomfortable I needed to do something about it — hence my joining Slimming World back in February. (As of tonight, I’ve lost 4.5 stone in total, incidentally.)

Let’s be realistic: people judge each other on appearances, like it or not, and six months ago I was absolutely ashamed of my appearance. I didn’t like going out because people would see me; I didn’t like walking past windows because I could catch a glimpse of myself; I didn’t like wearing any of my clothes because none of them really fit properly any more; and mirrors, well, no. Just no. I’ve always had something of a lack of self-confidence — again, this can be traced in part back to my school days; at primary school I was taunted on a daily basis for having “big ears”, while at secondary school the aforementioned crap hair, bad skin and zits were picked on — but this was the absolute lowest point I’ve ever been.

Today, though, some 4.5 stone lighter, I know I still have some way to go, but I’m much more comfortable in myself and, when depression and anxiety aren’t laying me low, I can actually notice myself being more open, confident and less embarrassed to be myself. Just yesterday I successfully made some small talk with the store clerk in Game when I was buying Splatoon and didn’t come away from the experience thinking “they hate me” or “they think I’m disgusting”, which are things I’d thought following a passing interaction in the past. And while this may not sound like much, with everything I deal with in my head, this felt like a noticeable and significant victory, and worth celebrating.

I’m conscious I’m talking generally while the question implies I should be thinking about specific people, but I feel these points are relevant; self-confidence is something that is important in your interactions with anyone, and while I’m certainly not in a position where I’d call myself “confident” or “outgoing” — I’m still an introvert at heart — I am in a position now where yes, I feel like I could meet someone new, have a conversation with them and not make them never want to see me ever again.

Finally, then, there’s the matter of changing interests. My interests actually haven’t changed all that significantly over the years; I’ve always been into video games, board games, computers, music, reading and writing. Perhaps the biggest change is in the “subgenres” of certain aspects, specifically my enjoyment of Japanese games, anime and other popular media. As many of you will know, a lot of this sort of thing is enormously polarising and very much an acquired taste, so if there’s anywhere I think I’d struggle with if I were meeting an old friend for the first time today, it’d be with regard to these niche interests, and particularly a lot of the mainstream popular assumptions about what people who like that sort of thing are into. (That’s a rant for another day, of course.)

There are people I’ve drifted away from due to diverging interests. There are also new friends I’ve made as a result of these diverging interests, that happen to converge in different places. That’s how life goes; as much as we’d like to believe certain things last forever, sometimes we move on, we grow, we change, we become different people.

Ultimately I like to believe that I’m a decent person, and that anyone I’ve known for a long time I’d be able to at least get along with today. We became friends for a reason, after all, and in many cases friendships are struck up over that simple, indescribable “click” you get when you start interacting and realise that the person you’re talking to is someone absolutely on your wavelength. It’s difficult (though, sadly, not impossible) to get rid of that “click” once you’ve had it, and so, to finally answer the original question: I do think I’d get along with people I’ve known for a long time if I only met them for the first time today. Our relationship might develop differently to how it did in reality, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; true friendships allow you to get along regardless of circumstances and regardless of differences.

1754: Yet Another Exhortation for Websites to Stop Bugging Me

As the years have passed, the Internet has undergone continuous improvement for the most part. It’s now one of the most — if not the most — democratic media in the world, for better or worse, allowing pretty much anyone around the world to speak their brains on pretty much any subject they’d care to share with anyone who wants to listen. (This blog is, of course, a prime example of this in action; I’m still frankly bewildered anyone reads this at all.)

But not every improvement in the Internet has been a positive one. In fact, one thing specifically appears to be on the rise, and it’s not at all a positive thing, despite usually being implemented with good intentions.

I am referring to websites that, within moment of you arriving, pop up a Google Hangouts-style chatbox in the corner of the screen, often featuring a photograph of some overly-chipper looking person, and invite you to “chat” if you need help.

Now, in principle this isn’t a terrible idea. Those who are less familiar with the Internet will probably appreciate having guidance on hand — immediately, and without having to seek it out — should they run into difficulties. (That said, assuming that “those less familiar with the Internet” are too dim to determine that clicking on a link that says “Help” — as most (vaguely useful) websites offer — will actually provide them with assistance is, to be honest, rather insulting towards those who are “less familiar with the Internet”. And yes, I’m primarily talking about old people.) Having a live person on hand is, theoretically, a great thing, as it means you can ask questions without having to work out what the specific search terms to describe the problem you’re having are — and then discover the only vaguely useful search result is an unanswered forum post from three years ago of someone having the exact same problem and never resolving it, of course.

The implementation, however, leaves something to be desired. Take WordPress here, for example. I started composing this post and not five seconds after the post editor had appeared, up popped a little blue box in the corner of the screen cheerfully enquiring “Hello! How can we help?” It’s distracting, it’s annoying, it’s patronising and it is, in this case, unnecessary: I have been using WordPress for… (checks) quite a long time now, and thus it’s probably reasonable to assume I know my way around most of it — and that anything I don’t know how to do I’m perfectly comfortable with looking up in help files and forums.

That doesn’t stop this silly little box from popping up every few times I start creating a post, however — yes, it’s not even every time I start writing a post. No, apparently WordPress believes that maybe two or three times a week I’ll reach some sort of existential blogging crisis and rather than, as most bloggers would do, pontificate about it for a thousand words in a self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness post, I would like to “chat” with someone about it. I do not want to “chat” with anyone from WordPress. I would like them to be on hand if I have a specific question, but I’m more than happy to use the already established channels for that — I don’t need live support.

And it’s not as if this “live” support is particularly live, anyway. Owing to the fact that most chat support people are juggling a number of different conversations at the same time — each of which is with someone who has a markedly different thinking and typing speed from everyone else they’re interacting with — it can often take minutes at a time to get a response. Not exactly “instant” messaging. And, okay, it’s still quicker than waiting a day or two for an email response — or more, if you ever have the misfortune to deal with any sort of government agency via email — but the benefit of instant messaging is supposed to be that you can get an immediate response, and if that one benefit isn’t even present in these ever-present “How can we help?” boxes, then there’s no fucking point them being there in the first place.

I might write a letter. That’s always seemed like the most satisfying — albeit least time-efficient — means of expressing your dissatisfaction. Although sadly, it’s also one of the easiest to ignore in this digital age. But the recipient actually receiving and reading it isn’t necessarily the point in many cases; often putting pen to paper is a cathartic experience that makes the frustrated party get a few things off their chest and calm down a bit. It may not resolve anything in the long run, but, speaking from personal experience, by golly does it sometimes make you feel better.

So that’s how you can help me, WordPress. You can bugger off with your patronising little chat box, otherwise you might just find yourself on the receiving end of a sternly-worded letter written on actual paper.

Or not. I might just stop getting worked up over stupid little things like this and go and do something fun instead. Hah! That’ll be the day, eh?

1704: The Improved Posting Experience

All right, WordPress, you win. After bugging me constantly with urges to try the “improved posting experience” while I was just trying to write my blog, let’s give this “improved posting experience” a go and see if it’s actually any better than the “posting experience” most WordPress users are accustomed to. Here we go, then.

So first up, it’s pretty blue. This puts it in line with the main WordPress.com site, where those using WordPress.com to manage their blog and/or be part of the WordPress community of bloggers can tweak their blog settings, fiddle with multiple sites and subscribe to other people’s blogs. In that sense, it’s consistent; however, where it’s inconsistent is with the rest of the WordPress dashboard, which is still the black and grey it’s ever been.

Let’s take a look at functionality.

There’s drag and drop for images… sort of. You can drag an image file onto the post editor, but this doesn’t automatically insert it into the post at the point where you drop it, disappointingly; rather, it simply brings up the regular media browser (which now doesn’t match the new editor) and uploads the image, at which point you can insert it into the post where you left the cursor. (This didn’t work first time I tried; I had to close the media browser, reposition the cursor, then open it again and then insert.) It also inexplicably forgets the default setting for image size that you might have been using in the “classic mode” (ugh) “posting experience”.

As for other functionality, there’s the same toolbar as the regular WordPress “posting experience” (no, I’m not going to stop the sarcastic quotation marks around that phrase anytime soon) but, like the media browser, it forgets your default settings, in this case whether you have the “kitchen sink” second row of buttons (allowing access to styles, underline, justification, text colour, special characters, indents, undo and redo — all pretty useful stuff) open or not.

Over on the right of the editor, there’s a bunch of pop-open menus for the post’s status (draft, scheduled, published), tags and categories, a featured image, whether the post will be shared on social media (and whether there will be a custom message), an attached location, a front-page excerpt, and the mysterious “advanced settings”, which include… drum roll…

…a custom slug, the author of the post, the format of the post, its visibility, whether or not it’s a sticky, and whether it allows likes, shares, comments and pingbacks. Hmm. Not all that advanced, really.

I can’t really tell what’s better about this “improved posting experience” to be honest, and in a number of ways it’s actually inferior. It certainly looks quite nice — the pop-open menus on the right keep things very neat and clean, for example — but it has this improved look at the expense of ease of access to information and settings.

The standard WordPress editor may be more cluttered and rather more clinical-looking than the soft blues of the “improved posting experience”, but it’s also considerably superior. Information and settings can be popped open and closed at will — it’s all open rather than closed by default — and the screen gives you much more information, most notably on the status bar at the bottom of the editor, where you have a word count and a “last edited” date — both of which are completely absent from the “improved posting experience”. There’s also easy access to all other aspects of your site via the left-hand side menu.

Also worthy of note: when I started writing this post, there was a button to switch back to “classic mode” which promptly disappeared when I saved a draft. Getting back to the standard editor required logging back into this site’s dashboard, going to the post list and then choosing to edit my draft. Somewhat cumbersome.

I can see the intent behind the “improved posting experience” — it’s to strip out all the stuff that might prove daunting to those less familiar with technology and software such as WordPress. It’s an attempt to make it into a simple and clean blog editor along the lines of Tumblr. Trouble is, that’s never what WordPress has been about; WordPress has always been the blog solution to go to when you want customisability and a lot of control over what you’re posting, when and how — and without having to mess around with HTML and CSS for styling.

Perhaps the “improved posting experience” will encourage more new users to give blogging a serious go. And that’s ultimately a good thing. For people like me, though, who have been using WordPress for years now, it’s very much a step backwards rather than forwards.