My Relationship With WordPress
Bitter Embattlement with A Blogging Behemoth
In the middle of the 2002-2003 school year, a friend of mind made a half-sideways comment about having a LiveJournal account. At the time I had no idea what LiveJournal was or who Brad Fitzpatrick was, or even really what blogging was, but I was enticed by the fact that LJ was invite-only at that time and asked him for an invite.
My first couple of entries in my LJ sucked, I’ll be honest. I complained, I moaned, I attempted to be funny, I linked to news stories, I kvetched, I b!tched about exams. It was the classic blog fodder, really. Nothing really interesting to say, but saying things anyway.
The next college semester rolled around and I had handed out a couple dozen of my own LJ invites to a few people who joined me in fogging up the blogosphere with more of our mindless drivel. We had fallen into the blogging trap: community.
We wrote entries talking about our day, we commented on each others entries, we debated, fought, whined, and invoked drama.
And that was that until about mid-way through my junior year of college (probably, um, 2004-2005) when a fellow geek friend of mine mentioned he had registered a couple of domain names. I, at the time, didn’t entirely know how to do that so I pinged him about it and he showed me how to setup my own website. Suddenly I had a full site to fill up with not that much to say.
So I installed Wordpress expecting to have a similar experience to LiveJournal’s blogging platform. I complained, I moaned, I attempted to be funny, I linked to news stories, I even kvetched and b!tched about exams….but something was missing. Something important. My friends and the built-in audience from LiveJournal.
It was a new school year and keeping up the friends I had made before proved difficult for me. We still talked, but it wasn’t the same as when they were on the same floor in my dorm. The community I had built around my blog (and my friends’ blogs) was dying or had already died and was in the post-mortem process of expelling bodily fluids and emptying orifices. (savor that image, why don’t ya?)
Which brings me to Wordpress as a blogging platform. For the years since I gave up on LiveJournal and “became a real boy” with my own website, I tried ever so hard to make Wordpress do what I really want. It never did quite…do it…for me, though, and here’s why:
- My friends had to sign up all over again. Getting them convinced to use LiveJournal was hard enough, attempting to convince them to move to another platform (or sign up for an account specifically so that they could comment on my blog) proved downright impossible.
- Comment management and the lack of threaded comments just about killed any form of discussion. Sure there were plugins to reproduce the threaded comments from Livejournal, but that’s work that I shouldn’t have to do.
- The lack of a decent native client that looked great and worked without any form of hitch whatsoever is pretty discouraging, and the total suck that is the WordPress WYSIWYG editor was a huge nail in the coffin.
- The fact that it always seemed to try to be more than just a blogging platform annoyed the living sin out of me. Pages and Categories and Links and Widgets and Plugins…my god, could it make me dinner and fold my laundry too?
- Browsing archives of entries was a total pain in the neck.
- The navigational setup inside the admin panel was totally unintuitive. Who organizes a CMS into “Write, Manage, Comments, Blogroll” anyway? I have to click on one of those in order to create a new post (which is 99.99% of why I came to my site in the first place) and click somewhere else in order to edit it or “un-publish” it?....mumbles something about REST resources
- All of it’s configuration was stored in the database, which means that when the database servers went down (which, at Dreamhost, is like every day), the site shat upon itself rather than relying on caches or static-files.
For the couple years since I switched from LiveJournal to Wordpress, I kept hoping that maybe the next version would be better. Maybe it’d remember it was a blogging platform and stop trying to match my socks or cook me dinner. Maybe the WYSIWYG editor would stop rewriting my <p> tags or respect my line-endings. Maybe ….. maybe …..
All I really wanted, since I no longer had the comments coming in from friends and family, was a simple content management system that let me do what I wanted to do without the overhead of features I didn’t use, nor the stupidity to make my main use-cases difficult or annoying.