(I updated this entry in July 2020 to include another WordPress-related debacle, which has finally solidified my decision to leave WordPress.)

Here, I tentatively offer the first of what might become many: a webpage on my own site, masquerading as a blog entry. Quite a bit of thought has led to this and I will attempt to explain it briefly.

What’s The Difference?

If you use WordPress or are otherwise informed about how these things work, skip this section. For the rest of you: I’ve been using WordPress as my blog’s “platform”. This means I installed their software into my website, use their “dashboard” to publish and edit blog entries, and trust a set of databases to keep track of everything. WordPress (and a couple of plugins) keep track of all the comments, likes, shares, statistics, etc. — the interaction part of the site.

All that comes in handy. It means that most of the time, all I have to worry about is typing my content — I don't have to worry about populating the sidebars or the front page of the blog — WordPress does all that for me. But it also means that I’m not entirely in control of my blog. I depend on WordPress to work smoothly, and I depend on their updates to keep the editor interface modern.

All the non-blog pages on my website (like this poem page, for example) are hand-coded by me using a text-editor. For these, I have complete control of content, design, backup, etc. But it also means that I’m responsible for every link in the sidebar, building the “theme” (layout/design) from scratch using css and html code, keeping track of all entries both in my local computer and on my webhost.

So why am I considering a switch, if WordPress makes things easier?

The New WordPress Editor

WordPress recently pushed through a system-wide update that completely changed the editing interface. Without getting too deep into it, the new interface makes every single thing I do there more difficult, removed several options that I used daily, added several options that I don’t understand and can’t figure out, and — basically — broke the editor.

Everyone is raving about this. Every site I could find that mentions the new editor thinks it’s wonderful. “Everything works better! We want to make love to it!” And that’s fine. I’m glad people like it. I might like it too, if I could get it to work.

(And it’s not just the editor. If you’ve followed me a while, you know I’ve had issues with themes, comments, and other facets of the platform.)

Valuing My Time

If I were a 20-something tech geek with no children, I would bike over to Starbucks and figure this thing out — probably. But I’m not. I’m a 40-something (“something” is a number that increases more rapidly than I would like) parent, spouse, and homemaker who’s got plenty of other things to do. More important things.

Even among my hobbies, blogging is not the most important thing. I’ve decided I simply won’t waste any more hours trying to figure this out when I already have a workable solution staring my in the face — coding the pages myself.

Hidden Benefits

One huge benefit of coding the pages myself is that I can easily set up css classes for formatting things like tables, subheads, blockquotes, photo captions, etc. — something that was incredibly difficult with WordPress. In the past, I’ve kept a ready list of copy/paste code for my preferred formatting of those items. But it meant I had to copy/paste them every time.

With my own code, I only have to code the style once. Then each time I only have to call the “blockquote” style (for example) and the blockquote will look exactly as I want it to. See below:

“This is a blockquote section. It looks exactly how I coded it to look. And if I want to change it, I only have to make the change in one place and it will change the style for all blockquotes in this section of my website.”

Wil C. Fry, 2018

What It Means For You

You, my dear reader, don’t have to do anything — depending on how you normally arrive at my site. If you have a bookmark saved, you’ll want to change it to wilcfry.com/verily/. If you got here via a search engine, things might be trickier until they start picking up this page.

But your reading experience shouldn’t change much. Comments will now be handled by Disqus (see below), until I can think of something better.

Less Than 100% Commitment

I’m not 100% committed to this switch. That means I might switch back due to certain factors. My old entries will (for now) remain on the WordPress platform — because I don’t know of an easy way to transfer many hundreds of separate entries to this format. If I do attempt to switch them someday, it will likely be a few at a time, over the course of many months. Doing so will break some links — something I’m loathe to do.

Tweaks Will Take Time

I’m happy to make tweaks to the look and feel of this new format. I will likely change the font, colors, shapes and sizes of elements, spacing, and so on — over time. And I am happy to take suggestions to that effect.

One thing I won’t do is switch to a light background and dark text. I know some of you prefer that, but it really does pain my eyes.

Please bear with me as I struggle through these changes — and understand that writing and maintaining this blog isn’t my primary activity in life.

UPDATE, 2020.07.06: Finally Done With WordPress

As you know, the few of you who’ve been following along, I did continue my little experiment mentioned above — through 2019 and into 2020. All my blog entries after this one were hand-coded in a text editing application (as opposed to using a CMS like WordPress). It worked for me. But I continued to keep most of my older entries at the old location, because it was simply too difficult to move all those entries en masse from the SQL databases into web pages like this one.

But today (July 6, 2020), something further happened. I logged into WordPress with the intent of editing an older entry still hosted there. My dashboard informed me that my web host’s PHP was out of date. I didn’t know what that meant, so I spent some time informing myself, then went over to my webhost’s cPanel (you can already tell this is too complicated for someone who just wants to write) and updated the PHP to the latest version. Well, then my WordPress pages wouldn’t load at all, and neither would the dashboard. There was a nonsensical error message (“Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress”) which I then spent another two hours researching. None of the pages I found had any solutions that worked for me. So now, not only can I not log in to my WordPress dashboard, I can’t even see any of the older entries that I was keeping there.

So I had to make a decision. One option was continuing to research the issue, possibly ending with a phone call to my web hosting company, in an attempt to solve an issue with a CMS that I don’t even use anymore. That option, even if I eventually arrived at a solution, would require plenty of my free time, and the result would be that I’d be in exactly the situation I was in before the PHP update — all my older content hosted on a platform that I can barely use and don’t like.

The second option was to finally call it quits and move on. I have all my old blog entries backed up locally (on my own hard drive, in difficult to parse XML files), so the content isn’t lost to me — it just isn’t on my website anymore. I can easily clean any WordPress files from my webhost and clean up my directory trees, and (with a little more trouble) look for and remove any now-dead links to my old blog entries. Then, going forward, if I want to, I can comb through the XML files and see if any of that older blog content still needs to be online in any way.

The net results of all this: I’m done with WordPress entirely. Almost all my blog entries prior to late 2018 aren’t online right now and likely won’t be for quite some time. It wasn’t up to me after all; what I thought would be a routine update broke the whole thing and it’s simply too much trouble on my end to untangle that mess.