Day: August 26, 2021

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Readers, Please pardon the Sidebar

It seems that WordPress decided to NOT tell me on opening the widgets panel, (Which I had carefully arranged the way I wanted them,) would result in a royal fuckup. This fuckup encompassed not only of the widget that I wanted to add a single line of HTML to, but destroyed every widget, including those that WordPress supposedly maintained.

Hey, THANKS GUYS!

Now I get to figure out the “New” damned widget system, and honestly my first take is this:

I DON’T LIKE IT!

I was perfectly content to use HTML to do what I wanted to. I was perfectly content to have a simple widget bar down the left side of my blog that presented information the way I wanted it.

I didn’t ask for a visual editor that randomly throws <SPANS> and Font changes, paragraph to paragraph. I didn’t ask for an HTML editor that apparently doesn’t actually like some of your <!– wp:paragraph –> tags in certain arrangements (even though YOU WordPress are adding those elements).

I ESPECIALLY don’t like the fact that you’ve created and released a buggy widget editor that incorrectly converts some HTML and chokes if there is a <Space> between the last character of text in a line and a <Line End>.

This is especially annoying, since there’s no way to see either, within the editor. Attempting to post such a line will result in an error that prevents the user from making any changes. Although, apparently this is an editor problem, not an underlying system problem since the badly converted text is displayed in the first place.

So what should have take 2 seconds has now taken at least a couple of hours to learn how to manipulate, partially reconstruct, and of course debug. (See Above)

Sometimes… making changes is not in the best interest of anybody. Sometimes making changes just creates more work. But I suppose it gave some coder 6 more months of work on a work visa.

Hey, here’s an idea… if you can’t save a chunk of something, how about providing something more descriptive than an error occurred? Better yet, HOW ABOUT HIGHLIGHTING the element you’re having a problem with?

Grrrr.

Just as a point. I’m not even particularly pleased with your new visual blog editor.