Super sorry if you’ve been getting notifications of old posts being published today everyone.
Went a bit mad this week as repair work on the website, post WordPress 5.0 update came to demotivated stand still. An hour or two a day of repairs until March wasn’t working for me. So I just spent the last three days working on repairing as much as I could. I’m 45 hours into repairs. About 5 more hours of repairs to go I think. Found a stack of extra problems with the Gutenberg import.
Also found if I drafted an old post then set it to published again it sent out a publication notice to every channel, email and social media with no option of not doing so. The usual bit you publish that has options to share to all social networks was actually greyed out. How silly is that. I published a few posts before realising they were appearing on my Twitter and Tumblr and people were leaving comments on the blog like they were new posts.
Pretty livid about the whole thing but the bulk of the work is done now. Crack a beer open with me and cheer as it means I’m going to have more time than expected to work on new Fears.
Cheers for sticking with me as always everyone. I’m so glad you all still enjoy a smidgeon of fear-filled humour every morning, with me, here. Have a great Sunday everyone!
Have you tried the WordPress update yet? I notice a lot of people in comments are saying they’re scared of it but haven’t tried it yet.
Well… Go try it. It’s an update that’s been coming for well over a year. We’ve had nearly a year to try Gutenberg, the new editor, to see if we like it or not. There are options for returning to classic editor, but ultimately, the new editor is coming (or here if you updated this weekend) and it’s here to stay. make a new account or if you self host, create a subdomain and use a fresh install of WordPress 5.0.
If you don’t like Gutenberg you can always try Medium.com for a brilliant writers website. From fiction to politics to lifestyle. It’s a social media built for writing and reading. If you need a homepage, try Squarespace, Wix or Weebly.
In my opinion, the WordPress team are trying to make an editor that can in some way stand up to Squarespace’s and Wix’s website editors. It has a block functionality that allows you to add new and different things to your blog posts without the need for plugins or HTML. For some people, this new way of doing things is completely awesome. For others, it’s going to really mess with peoples workflow.
The old editor was pretty dated. Squarespace, Wix and Weebly have made website creation very accessible, WordPress was going to start losing a decent lump of new bloggers to the more modern website builders. Not everyone wants to learn HTML or website building to run a blog. Even if it’s just five minutes of their time. WordPress has always lagged behind in that respect.
The downside to this is you get people like me. I’ve been using WordPress to blog since 2004’ish. I’m well stuck in my ways. So the new editors an issue for me. I used WordPress because it was WordPress. Not a block-based web builder.
The reason my own website broke so completely is partly my fault. This website has broken numerous times over this last year and hasn’t even been fully fixed when I’ve done complete re-installs. So when updating to WordPress 5.0, it was a catalyst that blew up every bug, issue, code error and media problem I’ve had this last year. I back up once a month so had access to a folder with my media library, but when importing the websites XML it didn’t want to accept my media library was there. Even using plugins to re-attach all my media, I’m still having to go through and manually edit every single post.
I also have an issue with inline images no longer working unless made with the Gutenberg editor. So that little line of icons at the bottom of every post exploded across my screen and made a right mess. Again, every post on this site needs that edited out.
My old theme also spat the dummy out and won’t function with WordPress 5.0 so I’ve spent a lot of today figuring out a new layout for the website. Almost there.
The amount of work I need to do on this website is going to take me weeks. It’s a horrific pain in the arse, that’s partially self-inflicted. I could have been far more prepared for this.
So, the thingy of this post. Don’t panic. There are good reasons why my website died so catastrophically. Gutenberg is coming. Like it or not. Go try it now. Don’t fear something you don’t understand. You might like it. You can revert to the classic editor through a plugin, but eh, Gutenberg is the way WordPress want things done now. Reviews on Gutenberg are pretty split. As is often the way with the Internet, it’s easier to rant than to praise.
One last thing. If you hate Gutenberg or find bugs, let the devs know. But have some humanity with it and don’t go abusing, threatening and being a dick to the developers. The internet doesn’t need any more abusive rage.
Introducing Door for this weeks #Colour_Collective. A cute wee missy, known for guarding a door. This weeks colour is Auburn.
The Little Fears website will be getting an overhaul this weekend. I adore my theme, layout, look and feel. But unfortunately, in Automatics infinite wisdom, their reader has never displayed featured images in their own WordPress reader. Baffling. Our largest followings can’t view our posts in full. This is a rather large job for me as it means I have to manually edit every post on the Little Fears to move the featured image to the first image in a post. 842 posts to be exact. Cripes. Wish me luck!
With special thanks
Weekly shout out to my $10 patron, Warren from IWrite. Without people like Warren, I wouldn’t be able to wake you all with my little fears and you’d probably cry a lot less in the morning than you already do. So please do check out Warrens blog.
The lead Fear of this weeks update. Awwww, the littlest of little fears. A teensy fear for this weeks #Colour_Collective.
Walker
The creature I showed off earlier this week. She’s now on a tee over on my Threadless store and she’s available from $12.95.
Semi-related, I’ll be sharing my experience selling tees on Threadless for Monday’s process blog post. If you have any questions about Threadless, let me know, and I’ll get them on the Monday blog.
Head on over to Patreon and pledge $10 or more a month and not only will you help with Hydra’s feed bill, but you will also get that weekly shout out with a link back to your site. https://www.patreon.com/littlefears
Little Fears 