On Tuesday, we had an actual blizzard. It happened at 2am so I didn’t bother much with it. There had been warnings and preparations had been made. I think we may have lost power for a minute or two in my town. Some places fared worse. But still, actual blizzard…
So on Tuesday evening, when I went to check on the morning blog post — because these days I have to manually share with social media, WordPress being rather unsocial — there was no blog administrator page. No WordPress at all. When I tried to load anything from WordPress, including most of their support pages, all that loaded was a white screen with their logo in the middle. Disconcerting, but not surprising. Because blizzard, you know. Also the entire rest of the country was experiencing various disasters. So I turned off the computer and chalked it up to bad weather.
Wednesday morning… still nothing. But I was also having a bad COVID day, so I didn’t care so much about the blog. I turned off the computer again and decided to address it after work.
Because, yes, I’m working with COVID. Apparently, the powers that be have determined that “we have no COVID policy anymore”. Meaning employees need to use their combined time off to stay home, and customers get to deal with people who have active cases as long as they’re masked and not too symptomatic. Also our entire company has COVID right now, so there are no people to cover for me. But anyway…
Wednesday evening, still nothing but white space. I dug around trying to find a third party that might either say what was going on with WordPress or might give me a contact that wasn’t attached to the WordPress website. But nothing. So I gave up and went to bed.
This morning, I woke up fretting about losing all the work I’ve done on WordPress and came downstairs very early to muscle my way into some sort of solution. Surprisingly, I found a support email address (if any of you want it, let me know…). I sent off details on my computer, my browser and the problem I was having. And then I had to go to work.
This evening… after a bit of back and forth with maybe bot “support”, I think there was a human on the end of the final message. This message more or less told me that WordPress no longer supports my computer. Mind you, it worked fine until Tuesday and nobody has told me what might have changed on Tuesday to make it not fine, but anyway…
I was told to try other browsers. Fortunately, I have another one that I tolerate. I am using it now. I don’t like it as much because it doesn’t let me filter out as much grack, but as I said, I can tolerate it. However, I get the feeling that this is a temporary measure. If WordPress “doesn’t support my computer”, eventually, no browser is going to work.
I don’t know that WordPress doesn’t support my computer… that seems rather stupid of them considering how many of this machine there are in the world. But I don’t doubt that they’d like their customers to be a bit more accessible than I am, with my firewalls and adblockers and so on. So I can see this relationship with WordPress not ending well… and probably ending soon.
So to sum… I have COVID… there are various weather disasters hitting every few days. I am still very behind on many projects, including writing. And I now have to research content management services that don’t cost too much. Because I don’t make any money at this, you know.
Once upon a time I might have just pasted together my own web-server. Or, more accurately, had Ex do it because I kinda hate doing stuff like that. It feels like such a waste of my time. And it takes up such a lot of my time! But this week, even a search for a new hosting system seems like a lot of work on top of a lot of hell. And I am tired! I don’t want to mess with finding someone I can PAY to host this serial tirade with recipes…
But here we are.
All this is to say… there undoubtedly will be erratic posting for a bit.
And tomorrow night… we’re supposed to have another storm.
Yippee skippee…
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 