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WordPress is hard
November 18th, 2024
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In most tools I can think of, easiness of use comes at the cost of
difficulty of repairability, tweaking and general "hacking".
Recently, I had to (yes, "had to") write a blog post in WordPress;
and man, what an unpleasant experience.
First, the spell checker would not let me write as I meant, underlining
pretty much every word I wrote. Okay, it couldn't detect that I
were writing into several languages. Accorded, the spell checker
was my browser thing. But still, what a pain. I went to school and
had grammar classes, I know (mostly) how to proofread and else I own
my mistakes and typos.
Second, trying to tweak the html to make changes manually that were
not an option into the widgets of the WordPress editor ended up
into invalidating and breaking the whole thing. WordPress doesn't
like you peering into the inside to make changes that were not meant
to be done by the WordPress devs.
In short, preventing you to do mistakes generally does not let you
do what you mean to do, and just write what you mean to write.
This was my luddite rant. I hope you enjoyed it. But pretty happy
to be writing this in gopher with a proper editor that doesn't get
in my way, this too is technology. But technology that is open,
simple and get just what it needs to do, let you write some text
and sharing it over the internet. Okay, there is no fancy headers,
footers, SEO guidelines and all that jazz, but this is my happy
place. Writer's block is already hard, no need to push a lot of
crap and friction over it, it won't make it go away.
Happy gophering, it makes the internet a better place.