So done with Wordpress

Caution: Rant ahead.

I've had it with Wordpress. I've spent hours trying to get the blog to look the way I want, and at every turn I'm frustrated by the new way Wordpress allows you (that's using the word "allows" in its loosest possible sense) to customize the look of the site.

This post is going to make me sound like an old fart, but as I'm 50 in 15 months, I'm growing a grumpy old man beard and I'm looking forward to being a curmudgeonly old git, I don't care. I used Wordpress from 2008 to 2014 and it was awesome. Nowadays, not so much.

Remember when themes were designed for blogging? Have fun finding one that's designed to do just that and isn't designed for e-commerce. From hours of scrolling through and installing multiple free basic blog templates, it seems that 90% of them are crippled to make you shell out on the premium version. You want to use a different headline font? That'll be $10. Same goes for link colours, header images, body text; you know, all the minor details that you'd never want to change. The 10% that aren't crippled basically suck.

I realise that blog styles have changed over the years. I also realise that the whole point of the internet these days is to monetize the shit out of everything. That's great if that's what you want to do, but I just want to write bollocks and slap photos online. Not photos of bollocks, obviously, that would be weird. I don't need something cutting-edge; I'd take a blunt spoon as long as I liked how it looked.

So after hours of pissing about, I ended up giving in and paying for some premium themes. It was a pretty good deal: 25 themes for $95. I had high hopes, I really did. Guess what? I still couldn't get it to look the way I wanted.

It doesn't help that WordPress introduced a customizer; it's what you see in the image at the top of this page. You click on the element you want to change, change it, and save it. But it's not as flexible as you'd think. I used to use a theme called Atahualpa, which allowed you to customize the theme to within an inch of its life. Unfortunately, as it doesn't work with the new customizer, you can't use it with WordPress any more. So I was stuck with a system that basically lets you do whatever you want, as long as the theme designers let you. You can add a few lines of your own CSS but as far as I can tell you can't change the main CSS stylesheet. I tried and it didn't seem to make a difference. Maybe it's write-protected?

So over the past few nights the conversation between me and WordPress has been something like this:

Me: I'd like to do this. Customizer: What, you actually want the header image on the front to appear on the individual blog posts? What is this, 2011? You mean you don't want the colours that everyone else is using? OMG you're soooooo old!? You, like, don't want a menu? Are you some kind of weirdo? Our focus group of Instagram whores and people who work for Facebook and therefore own the internet told us that this is the size photos should be, why do you want something different? You can almost hear the damn thing uptalking.

Every time tried to do something, it was like being in a training session with the guy who designed the CMS I used to use at work. "Anyone remember floppy disks? Haha." Yes, I do, and fuck you, your smug facial hair and your man bun, you patronizing git.

Right now, I feel like Grandpa in The Simpsons:

Anyway, I spent hours fannying around with different themes and just gave up. As setting up PMPainting was so easy, I decided to go the free route. Yeah, Blogger isn't that good but on the other hand it took me about 25 minutes to get this blog looking the way I want. And five minutes of that was finding a new header image, cropping it and adding the text. Blogger is being updated (the new version was going to launch in June July August whenever) and hopefully Google will allow the four people who work on it to develop some new themes, but I'll keep buggering about with this one till I'm happy; the only real issue I have so far is that it basically looks just like PMPainting.

So please, if all three of you could update your bookmarks to flatlanders-in-vermont.blogspot.com that would be great. The flatlanderinvermont name is gone; it's being used by someone who hasn't posted a single thing. Alicia did point out that I should pluralize flatlander as she's one too (and for that matter so are the dogs), so I tried to get flatlandersinvermont but that's owned by someone who hasn't updated their blog since 2006. I guess the werewolves got them.

And in case you're wondering: We're still packing.