Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Let me count the ways . . .

I hate WordPress.
  1. There's no excuse for a blog to require hours of special configuring to make it easy to use. Not in this day and age.
  2. It seems impossible to rearrange posts once they appear. (Here, for example, I can simply go to "Post Options" and reset dates and/or times. Voila! The post is where I want it.)
  3. It is impossible to reply to individual comments, follow individual threads, and expand/collapse threads.
  4. It is impossible to format comments without resorting to . . . what? I'm not even sure, since I don't know which codes are accepted, if any.
  5. Some comments just don't show up. Or show up late.
  6. There's no way to respond to a post, or see how many comments it has, from the blog's home page--unless, I suppose, some poor soul does all that bullshit configuring I mentioned above.
  7. And what's with the freaking boxes around individual paragraphs? (I'm guessing paragraphs are at the mercy of special configuring too.)
  8. Copying and pasting material from another source results in all kinds of pain-in-the-ass weirdness (like the entire text appearing in italics that can't be removed, or a section from the top appearing at the bottom, or broken sentences after commas).

If I felt like giving this more thought, which I don't, I could come up with a bunch of other gripes. So feel free to add any I've missed.

It astonishes me that today's technobrainiacs haven't been able to make WordPress more user friendly and reliable. Make it simple, Stupid! Not everybody has a degree in computer science or the time to dick around learning the ins and outs of every damned app and program and platform out there.

Yahoo Groups generally suck, Blogger ain't the greatest, but I'll take either of them over WordPress (and Live Journal too, for that matter) any day.

There. I feel a little better now.

5 comments:

Tam said...

Feel better now? :-)

I'm hopeless with that stuff as a general rule. I'm a user. I can learn ow to use different systems as they are created, I know some basic html but that's it. Don't ask me to custom fit something.

I do think Wordpress has it's issues. Look how for a year we couldn't make paragraph breaks at Wave's and it took someone in the IT biz to fix it. That is NOT a user-friendly system.

Ah well, have a great day.

Chris said...

KZ: 90% of what you were experiencing was due to the particular theme and initial setup options that DSP chose. And I bet part is just the level of familiarity with the system.

Tam: That page break thing seems theme-specific and not WP-specific.

Having switched from Blogger to WP myself, I'd take WP any day.

K. Z. Snow said...

My point is similar to Tam's.

Wave's blog is an excellent example. Look how many hoops she had to jump through just to get some very basic functionality, like paragraph breaks. She's lucky she has Christian to turn to (and apparently, it wasn't all that easy for him, a techie, to figure out!) What's more, it still isn't possible to format comments on her blog. And any material submitted for publication there has to be in plain text, no formatting whatsoever. It's a total PITA!

So I'm just looking at this from the perspective of somebody who wants to jump in and get 'er done -- no muss, no fuss. With WP, that isn't possible. I was so frustrated yesterday!

Chris said...

But it IS possible. Really. REALLY.

K. Z. Snow said...

Chris, I wish you lived nextdoor! ;-)