My general beefs with WordPress: part 1

I love WordPress. I do! And it’s pretty much free — as we know, no such thing as a free lunch and that — but there are a couple of things that really do peeve me about it. Well, a few. Ok, Matt, several. Heaps? Um … Let’s see …

• When you create a post, the publication date is the draft post creation date, not the date you eventually publish it (I think). Why??? I don’t want this. I don’t like this. Make it stop, Matt.
• Hardly anyone appears to read my blog. Sometimes I have to click ‘like’ on my own posts, because I feel sorry for them. I know that people do read them, because they tell me so, on various other channels.
• Bloggers (including me!) keep getting shut out from the site and thus can’t ‘like’ or comment on posts when they want to.
• Matt (founder of Automattic, parent company of WordPress, all hail the mighty Matt, respect, whassup bro) didn’t answer my PS/PPS/PPPS/PPPPS etc yet, and he certainly didn’t offer me a job. Not yet.
• That effing pop up. The one that continually asks me to subscribe. To my own blog. When I already have. When I also turned it off. ARGH! Please, I’m begging you Mattites, one of you must be able to point me to the correct way to turn this little beggar off for permanent?
• The USA time-zone-centrism. When I publish a post, it often appears to have been published…the day before?! I try to publish one post per day, so this infuriates the hell out of me. You have NO IDEA. You see, my time zone is ahead of the US time zone where WordPress’s head office is based. BUT this doesn’t even make much sense for the company itself, since the Mattites (or pressgang, as I also affectionately know them), are dispersed globally too.
• Matt didn’t subscribe to my blog. Boo. (He didn’t even comment. Rude!)
• The howdy. Having to see this every time I open up my site to do some blogging is pretty yuck: Howdy, Catherin J Pascal Dunk. As an Australian (albeit nonbinary) woman, I find it a highly inappropriate greeting. Too much … in my face? It reminds me of the cowboy movie re-runs I watched growing up in the 80s, and by association has connotations of toxic masculinity and gunfights, and pretty much the worst of everything the USA has to offer (which is not inconsiderable — sorry Matt and all you other free-landers). What say we¹ just remove said offensively culturally imperialistic greeting completely? So there’d be no greeting at all! How about that? Or perhaps we² use all of that lovely steaming hot fresh IP address data at our³ techie fingertips to ensure that ‘Howdy’ only appears on the screens of pressers based in the home of the brave (assuming all of those stateside do in fact like it)?
• Pop in and say hi Matt! Anytime. Or hello. Howdy might earn you a laugh though.

P.S. Power to Autumn Fjeld for giving me the cheeky idea for these posts, and also the golden opportunity to give direct feedback to the mothership.

1. See? I actually already do work here Matt. Once you accept that, we’ll all be happier. ↩︎
2. See? (Jinx!) ↩︎
3. Personal jinx! Now you can’t talk till I say your name three times Matt … ↩︎

Image from Pexels Free Photos.