Another Damned Blog

Dear Reader(s),

My original plan was that the blog would display only a single post per day on the front page, as a stark contrast to the bulk of other blogs out there that update every six minutes and thereby contribute to what Neil Postman refers to as the information glut.

Then I got bored of having to wait to post things.

So then I decided I’d have only the latest day’s postings on the front page. And I set about asking how to do that on the WordPress support forums, but in a turn of events that will not surprise anyone who’s ever looked at the WordPress support forums, doing it the way I wanted to do it is either incredibly hard or impossible (fine, c’est la vie) and it’s moot anyway, as no one ever seems to answer questions on the WordPress support forums (fucking annoying, especially given how proud of their little open-source selves the WordPress community appear to be). I did manage to garner one answer, which told me in a roundabout way that what I wanted to do wasn’t gonna happen, and after that I returned to shouting into the void.

Honestly, every frickin’ time I look up something on the WordPress forums, my question was already asked a year ago and no one ever bothered to answer it, my question was already asked a year ago and the single response it received was a one-line note saying the question had been posted in the wrong section of the forum (“This should be in ‘Plugins and Hacks,’ not ‘How-To and Troubleshooting.’ Moving thread.”), or my question was already asked a year ago and the single response it received was a one-line note asking why they’d want to do that anyway. It’s maddening, because I like WordPress a lot, but posting on the support forums basically feels like going to the stereotypical parodied-on-SNL IT guy: Before your problem gets solved, it’s going to be made clear to you what a dope you are. Except with WordPress, maybe the problem won’t get solved.

(I understand they’re not a business and that I’m free to use a different blogging platform, but like I said, overall I like WordPress. It’s just that the support feels completely arbitrary and even the tone of the basic documentation varies from incredibly easy to understand to “Oh, no. You need to know these two things before you can implement this, but we didn’t mention those here because everybody should know them already.”)

OK, I’m done complaining. Point is: This looks more like a regular blog now. (Complete with boring posts that are only of interest to the blogger!)
—j