This post has had a gestation period of 5 years, in fact since December 2018 when WordPress released the much-hyped Gutenberg Block Editor update.
At that time I’d been blogging on WordPress for nearly 10 years and felt comfortable with using the platform.
This was in the halcyon days of blogging when hundreds would come here every day to read about London. These days the hit rates rarely reach three figures, in fact, I’m now averaging less than 50.
But first a little bit about me. Having been a typesetter since the early 60s, in 1982 we dropped using ‘hot metal’ and started assembling pages of type matter using machine coding. So you would think with over 40 years of experience with this code assembly malarkey, using the ‘upgraded’ WordPress system would be a doddle. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be.
CabbieBlog’s theme is Twenty Fourteen released as WordPress’s theme of the year. The theme’s sidebar headings were displayed in a distinctive typeface in black with a rule running above them. Now if I want to insert a new item they cannot incorporate this heading, even though they at WordPress developed the theme. The only way is to copy a previous heading.
The sidebar ‘What I would read on the rank’ is written in CSS, unfortunately, the first few characters on each line disappear beneath the sidebar’s edge, so it’s guesswork to write up a new book’s description.
The block editor is fraught with traps. Each post section has to have a new block, and trying to code in HTML is nigh impossible. Mistakes are easily made unless you keep a strict eye, if you update the post it reverts to a draft and doesn’t then publish at the scheduled time, and things jump and move around all the time.
Also, every time you click on anything, you have to wait for everything to stop moving or you risk clicking on the wrong thing.
Refreshing the page is something that takes an age and getting to look at your work, as readers would read it, often just doesn’t work.
Can someone tell me what specific concrete problem was raised with the old editor that Gutenberg is supposed to solve?
Oh! Did I say? The times are given in a 12-hour clock, presumably, the Gutenberg children don’t understand 24-hour timings.
Much of this was overcome by using the ‘classic’ version, in other words as we have always written posts. This was still possible as a secret pull-down tab enabling you to post in the old way (thank you BeetleyPete followers for the tip).
Not content with making life difficult for hobby bloggers, WordPress has promised the ‘out-of-date’ dashboard will be upgraded, and, no doubt, the secret button removed, this, of course, will force you to write in block editor.
You might think this is a post about an old man not wanting change until you look at Gutenberg’s popularity rating, (at 25.03.24) in which out of 4,006 ratings 2,414 gave it just one star.
I’ve tried using it for a while and it is terrible and it’s just gotten worse, how many mouse clicks does it take to do the simplest thing? It may be great for people who know how they want everything to look, from the very beginning down to whether your links are no-follow, and which text will be in italics. But if you work on the fly, or God forbid, make a mistake and want to change things, it’s awful!
By way of an apology and an excuse for this rather rambling post, goes to explain the cession of the daily post from CabbieBlog. Life is too short to keep fighting Gutenberg’s idiosyncrasies.
So with a heavy heart soon only Saturday’s Previously Posted, Sunday’s Trivia and Monday’s London Quote will appear, up until 29th February 2032 at 13.50. The Tuesday to Friday postings will cease, with just the occasional missive to hold your attention.
Adverts may start to appear as I’m not now prepared to pay WordPress for their ‘Personal Package’ which, ironically, when launched was aimed at the hobbyist blogger, the very people WordPress is doing their damnedest to exclude.
There is good news, should you have an overwhelming urge to follow my witterings, Substack has a platform that makes it possible for writers to communicate via email, with the addition of an app should you wish to read work from other writers. Once in a while an occasional London subject pops up in my brain, often these are not worthy of a long-form post, or short enough for a tweet. As an experiment, I thought I’d try drafting these snippets for anyone who would like to receive them and send them via email. It’s free, of course, titled Unblogged London. Most posts will be short reads only taking a couple of minutes to peruse with the addition of the odd photo. At uncertain intervals, you won’t be getting these that often, they’ll pop into your inbox. Signing up is free (a paid version is offered for some other Substack writers), contributions from me will always cost nothing. If you’d like to sign up please do so and consider sharing. CabbieBlog can be now be found on Substack under the title: Unblogged London, sign up for free and download the app.
If you have been following CabbieBlog since the Dawn of Time a huge thank you, it has been quite a journey these past 15 years.
I can’t sign off before a special mention must be made to thank those who’ve taken the trouble to comment on my ramblings. Regular commentators know who are, again, thank you for putting your virtual pen to my comments box.
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