Static Blog

Posted on July 17, 2022 Updated on October 26, 2023

For the near future, I won’t be posting, anymore. I upgraded to a “Pro” plan a few months back. That was a bad move. I was on “Premium” prior to that, knowing that WordPress would, eventually, corral everyone into the Gutenberg (block) editor…some kicking and screaming. I thought about coughing up more money for a “Business” plan but, never could come up with the funds. Premium is $99 a year, which translates to, roughly, $8 a month. When Pro showed up as an interim choice, I added the $80 upgrade to my Premium renewal and thought I would be good to go. I did get two very nice plug-ins…and everything else went to hell.

I have gone many, many rounds with the “happiness engineers” to no avail. One of their “explanations” for my site going nuts is that, Pro is on a different server and the “migration” didn’t work very well. Hm. Why didn’t you PHP geniuses figure that out before fucking up my site?

So, now, if I upload a video to my site, it will play in the phone app but, not the Reader (in a browser). If I embed my videos, they will play in the Reader but, not in the phone app…and they used to, even if off center from viewing.

Another piece of blowback on all of this is, my site, viewed in a browser on a phone, is whacked. It used to be a clean & polished looking mobile site. Not anymore. I was told by another loopy engineer that it was because my theme was “legacy” and it didn’t work well with AMP. My Premium account didn’t use AMP so, my site looked just fine. The suggestion was for me to find another theme. Um…why? I’ve had my theme for five years and I worked very hard to set it up the way I liked it. WordPress should step in and clean up THEIR mess, not require me…A PAYING CUSTOMER…to deal with their self-imposed shit.

My frustration level has been off the charts. During a recent chat with a WP genius, something really weird happened to my Reader in Brave. When the chat ended, I noticed that all the icons were gone. The Reader has icons next to words. They were all gone. When you looked for the “like” stars or the “comment” symbols, they were all gone. In their place were numbers, only. If there were no likes or comments, it was blank. I don’t know what the PHP genius did but, the Reader operates fine in Firefox. I was told to “clear my cache”, which I do everyday, to no avail.

This has ruined my desire to blog at all. My hell has been paid for, for the next year, so…here, it will sit. Unless something changes, I won’t renew, again. I read, recently, that Matt Mullenweg, Mr. WordPress, himself, isn’t hands on, anymore. Everything has been turned over to The WordPress Foundation. That is nearly as ominous-sounding as the World Economic Forum and we all know how well they fuck things up.

That being said, this site will not be shuttered. I maintain too much important information on my landing page:

Chris Thomas

I encourage everyone to read, watch & listen to everything I have posted on that page. I also own a documentary that is hidden because of copyright issues. If you would like to view it, send me an email.

I will be around… ~Vic