“What’s a PowerUserGuide.com”? asked the user who doesn’t follow everything I do? What, indeed.
This was supposed to be a productive night
Today was supposed to be a productive night. I wanted to make some changes to one of my sites. After I swapped out one cookie cutter template for another one, I wanted to add some widgets to the footer.
But WordPress.com, the Blog-As-A-Service giant had other ideas. How about I’d spend the evening not editing my footer instead? Because a while ago, WordPress enabled Gutenberg for widgets. And in the WordPress.com reality, that translates into “We accidentally kind of made editing widgets impossible.”
The widget editor experience was awful and the more I tries, the more I started to get frustrated with the entire process. The more I clicked around, I started to look around me and see WordPress.com for what it was. A dumbed down version of WordPress, where some of the features simply aren’t useful because they’re been dumbed down so much that anyone can’t / can use them.
Just for reference, I tried doing the same thing in a regular, off the shelf WordPress blog. In a few clicks, I got the job done. It once again proved that WordPress.com and WordPress, the blog software, keep growing further and further apart.
I started thinking about my options and stuff. I came to the conclusion that I’m still fairly okay with WordPress. Hell, I’m even okay with Gutenberg if it doesn’t get in my way too much (which it usually doesn’t).
My real issue is that WordPress.com is just a pain in the ass to use recently.
The New New New Plan
Let me create a quick timeline of plans I made in the last month or two:
- Joomla-and-more.com had to be axed because someone at OSM got bored
- I decided to replace it with PowerUserGuide.com
Up to half an hour ago, I wanted to abandon the entire website. All 400 articles. Because WordPress.com is abomination which I want to punch in the face.
But that feels like a waste of content, so here’s the latest and greatest plan.
I’m going to set up an “archive” of the WordPress.com blog on some hosting, and point PowerUserGuide.Com to it. I’ll keep the articles online and if people find their way to the blog and want to read them, then that’s fine.
Meanwhile, I’m finally moving away from WordPress.com. It appears I already cancelled my subscription a while ago. So now all that remains is finalizing the process. Since I own the domain name poweruserguide.com I can just make the move.
Maybe I’ll mess up big time SEO-wise, which is fine. At least I will no longer be paying over a hundred euros for a broken blogging platform which is vastly inferior to the (how ironic) free version it’s built on.