Blocks, BlogSpot, and bushwa

 

The new WordPress comments window.

Fuck me running.

The WordPress engineers have taken my comments right off the rails again.

Back in the Day®, when Things Made Sense©, a reader could comment on a blog post in seconds only. Find the little box headlined "Reply;" enter text in the box; punch the "Reply" button (rather than the author of the post); and hey presto! Comment appended to post. 

Easy breezy like a Cover Girl, que no?

Alas, in these Dark Days of Modern Times™, The Block Editor is All. It is not enough that the blogger bow before it; so, too must his readers.

Complaints to the WP "Happiness Engineers" yield replies, eventually, but no real solutions. The subtext seems to be, "Fuck this guy, his outdated machinery and equally ancient software, his Classic Editor, and his retired theme."

Well, shit. I don't like the Block Editor and I don't want to use it. And it seems my readers don't like using it when commenting. What to do, what to do. ...

Here, at BlogSpout, I also must deal with a block editor. It feels slightly less annoying than the WP version, but then again I only fiddle with it when WP annoys me, which they are doing at the moment. Would familiarity breed contempt? Possibly. Probably.

In the meantime, I think I'll publish this post and try commenting on it from another browser, see how that process goes. I'm about one more email from dropping WordPress after more than 20 years, and none of the other hot properties — Substack, Medium, etc. — really suit my needs.

I just want to be able to do my little back-and-forth with my small, deeply disturbed audience. Doesn't seem like too much to ask, but then these are Strange Times, full of Fear and Loathing.

A big bowl of dicks for all block-editor blockheads.

 Blockheads

The boyos at WeirdPress are at it again, dragooning me into accepting their block editor for managing widgets. They relented after I pitched a bitch, but warned me that I'd have to submit eventually, adding that my theme had been "retired."

So while I fiddle with Gutenberg over there, I figure I'll play with Blogger's take on the block editor here.

What the hell? Can't sing, can't dance, too fat to fly. ...

Forward, into the past

Me trying to work with the WordPress block editor.

Here's another item that falls into the category titled "Redundancy."

It's my Blogger account, another prefab blog setup from days gone by. I've had a bunch of these deals over the years, but WordPress and Blogger are the only ones I've held onto.

I haven't posted here since 2018, but now that WordPress has pissed me off again, it's something to consider.

Belt and suspenders

Here's your head, there's the keyboard, what's your hurry?

Technology being what it is — a fickle hoor with round heels, a substance-abuse problem and the rent 10 days late — this is something of a backstop to WordPress's plans to reconfigure its content-management system on Thursday.

This may throw a hitch into the gitalong over at the usual place.

I'm not hep to the latest jive, but I believe the folks who run a self-hosted WP model have the option of reverting to the original CMS via plug-in. I'm not certain that will work for those of us who suffer from sloth, torpor and and a tendency to pinch the eagle until it screams like a blogger who just had his CMS jerked out from under him.

So look for me here if you can't find me there.

If April showers bring May flowers . . .

. . . then what the hell does a March snowstorm bring? Rapid-fire profanity? Muddy trails? Hard-frozen Easter eggs? I'll let you know tomorrow, because it's bucketing down here, and the weather wizards say we could have as much as four sloppy inches on the ground by the time You-Know-Who has rolled away his stone only to see Jimmy Dobson standing outside the crypt with a shit-eating grin and a business proposal.

Herself dragged me, kicking and screaming, to a multiple-personality birthday party tonight. I wanted to hang out here in the old nerve center, playing with pixels, gargling Frog tonsil polish and committing libel, but nothing doing. A couple of former colleagues at Short Bus Community College have March birthdays, as do we, and since we're all foodies a potluck was in order.

Avery is our Queen and did most of the heavy lifting (a top-shelf, totally-from-scratch lasagna bolognese, a delicious dip whose ingredients I can't recall, the wine-buying and the hosting, with boyfriend Brendan); Steve contributed some freshly baked bread that made me wish I'd brought some butter along for the ride so we could eat the entire sonofabitch in the car; Tina, Brendan's mom, supplied her signature artichoke dip; and I concocted a roasted bell pepper salad from Giada de Laurentiis' "Everyday Italian" cookbook, a venture into uncharted culinary waters that had me standing outside in the falling snow in sweatpants, Wallace Beery shirt and Western Pack-Burro ASSociation cap, roasting red, yellow and orange peppers on the grill. No wonder the neighbors give me sidelong glances.

Anyway, I had fun against my will. I feel so violated.

Day 2 of the New Weird Order

Thanks for all of your comments on the new op'. Today will be a busy one in the old VeloNews.com barrel, but over the weekend, I'm going to try to give a little more oomph to this site's WordPress cousin, if only because Herself is working on a blogging project and requires input, no matter how defective the source (that would be me, not you, for the sensitive among the readership). Meanwhile, anonymous comments have been enabled so those of you without Google accounts can send me NastyGrams® (sorry about that oversight).

In other news, Big Brother is indeed watching; the NYT's Paul Krugman reminds us that not only have we learned nothing from Vietnam, we have forgotten the lessons of the Great Depression; Bill Richardson finally climbs down off the fence and endorses Obama; and Schlock Racing gets the extended middle digit from the Tour de Georgia, just, y'know, ’cause. There's more than you need to know on VeloNews.com for more on that one today. The barrel beckons.

Late update: Good Lord. If I wanted to work, I'd get a job. I barely managed to sneak out for a short run in Palmer Park between bouts of posting this, that and the other. The park isn't nearly as gooey as I figured it would be, but there are still plenty of squishy spots in the shade, so all you body-armored boneheads stay the hell away until things dry out. I don't wanna be tripping over your petrified tire tracks come June. Spread your spoor in Pueblo, where it was spring during winter.

There's a new dog at large

When my website-hosting company, Hostcentric, inexplicably began functioning about as smoothly and efficiently as the federal government, health care and the mainstream media, I decided to try fiddling around with a couple of alternatives to running my own largely unused communications empire. The first furry toe in the blogging water was a WordPress account that I can't get set up quite the way I'd like it; the second is the one you're looking at right now.

I might just go with this one. Frankly, I really don't need all the bells and whistles I'd worked into the original DogS(h)ite — and neither do you, because I hardly ever played any tunes on 'em. Most of the links were rarely updated or outright ignored. Cam, 'Toons, Mad Dog Unleashed, Radio Free Dogpatch — they all sat there like strays no one was gonna adopt. What's a dog to do?

Lift his leg on the whole deal, that's what. All I want to do is bark incessantly, howl at the moon, and leap over the fence (or dig under it). Tip over a few trash cans. Water neocons' lawns (and maybe their shoes, too).

Consider this the first squirt.