Waiting for a flight at Hamburg airport early last week I sat down at an internet terminal and was about to drop a coin in before the nice man sitting next to me said, “take mine, I have to go and there are about 25 minutes left on it.”
I thanked him warmly and sat down in his place, immediately typing lettershometoyou into Google to see if I could find Adsense ads on my blog. You’ve probably heard that they’re out there, lurking on every wordpress.com blog. It’s the price you pay for free hosting, and no amount of whining is going to get wordpress to take them off short of your paying them to do so.
Problem is, if you’re logged in to wordpress.com you never get to see them.
So every once in a while I slip into the skin of Joe Regular Blog Lurker to try to find out how Google is making an even greater mess of my blog. Do they stick ads for jock itch powder next to posts about my mother-in-law? Blurbs for psychiatrists next to write-ups about psychos? Tart up my skiing posts with pitches for helmets and handbaskets and other crap I have no use for?
The list of hits Google chucked up had me scrambling for my camera. Not for what they said, but for the public terminal’s net-nanny warning label:
At first I thought they were referring to my blog. After all, even if there are no trojans waiting to ambush the unsuspecting visitor, there is a ton of stuff here people might find harmful. Fake news, accounts of deception and outright lies, denunciations of crap, transcripts of discussions with an underage female child concerning condoms, naked girls in newspapers, death and more death. I don’t know why I haven’t already been hauled before a judge as a menace to society.
Then I realised the warning was all about WordPress.com. How could it not be? The link is to wordpress, not lettershometoyou, which only appears in the description.
Maybe it was just a forewarning, because a few days later I and millions of other unsuspecting WordPress.com bloggers logged on to find our blogging universe turned inside out without so much as a ‘”hey guys, guess what? Big changes coming up tomorrow at 4pm Pacific Daylight Saving Time.”
Did someone at WP central hit publish instead of save by mistake before turning out the lights for the weekend?
I’m sure after a few months this will all die down and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about, but in the meantime wordpress.com probably is harmful to your computer. Judging by the number of pissed-off entries on the forums, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a youtube video posted of someone throwing a laptop out the window frisbee-style in frustration. I don’t care what it looks like, merely uploading an image, for example, has become a mind-numbing chore, a multi-stepped process where once a couple of clicks sufficed.
This in an upgrade? Sure the savvy bloggers using wp.org had a go at it for a while, but given the huge drop in skill level between those bloggers and duffers like me using wp.com, didn’t they think to test it on a few hundred of us wp.com users who’d never seen it before? They could have run a little sneak-preview contest, choosing a hundred or so bloggers to run it through it paces for a month just to iron the kinks out.
Hell, maybe they did test it out on no-brain bloggers like me, I don’t know, but the way it was released reminds me of the time I bought a new desktop from Dell a few years back. The monitor was a new flat-screen model from the Korean firm LG, back when flat screen meant the surface was flat. The rest looked like an old-style monitor.
Anyway, the first one they sent didn’t work, so I sent it back.
The second one arrived three days later. It didn’t work properly either, so I sent it back, too.
The third one arrived a few days after that, and it didn’t work either.
So I phoned up Dell to complain – not for the first time – and asked them why they couldn’t ship me a monitor that worked. Their response? We can’t test the monitors as they come in, we just ship them along.
Fair enough, I said, but can’t they at least have someone switch it on at the factory? Twist a knob? Tweak a button?
Nööö, too expensive. It’s cheaper to ship them halfway around the world and have the consumer do the testing.
Happy blogging.
© 2008 lettershometoyou
The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
A while ago everyone was complaining about blogger and went to wordpress. I don’t know where you can go now!
I opened a WP account but didn’t bother going any further. I still find blogger suits me just fine. I don’t have to be particularly smart to use it and I like that…ciao
I work with underprivileged people in the Downtown Eastside, virtually all of whom are beginners online using antiquated equipment that approximates that found in the Third World. I am volunteering ALL of my students as beta testers the next time WordPress.com wants to do an update. If it had been possible to reach through the forum and strangle some people, I would surely have done so and cited the “upgrade” as a mitigating circumstance, if not inevitable cause. Did they test this thing on any actual computer less sophisticated than a Macbook Air?
I’m told that Macbook Air is more style than substance anyhow … told by someone who works with them and prefers his old normal Macbook.
rositta, I still think WordPress is much better than Blogger.
Yes, this new update was hugely annoying. There are so many things that still aren’t working properly. Shit.
Rain has a huge point though. The way it was introduced was pretty ham-fisted.
Yes, and I agree with Rain (and you), ian. This was a very big change to make without any previous notice.
More like your hosting service may fuck with your technology karma!
Apparently one of the reasons we weren’t given advance notice is the service would be vulnerable to hackers at that time. Not everyone buys this explanation, though. It would’ve been great to have an explicit tutorial that went up at the same time as the upgrade (where have all my buttons gone?…) I’m actually getting used to the “add media” function and kinda like it, although as you say it involves more steps. Still learning everything, but gradually coming to benign acceptance.
Topic #2: I’m so relieved it wasn’t the pizza that made this site potentially harmful!
Topic #3: Very glad you are feeling better.
If the Add Media function worked for me, I’d like it better. I love some, even MOST, aspects of the upgrade. But WP.com is a top-down organization in a bottom-up world and they totally should have seen this coming. Particularly the flack.
There’s a Wordcamp in Vancouver at the end of the month and Lloyd suggested I go. I imagine I’ll be feeling the luv from the techies, as in that world everything works perfectly. If Wordcamp was representative of users instead of developers, it would be a different story.