Today I learned that WordPress has spent the last twenty years solving problems I did not know I had.

I wanted a blog.

Not a website. Not a publication platform. Not a content-management system with reusable patterns and global style presets and template parts nested inside groups nested inside columns nested inside some other thing I accidentally clicked.

A blog.

I wanted to type words, occasionally add a picture, and hit Publish.

This was apparently unreasonable.

I started by letting WordPress’s AI build the site for me. I explained that I wanted something simple: mostly text, a little early-internet flavor, basically a field journal for the digital archaeology project I’ve been working on.

It actually made something pretty good.

Unfortunately, it also made something I could not understand.

The AI knew how it had built the site. WordPress knew how it had built the site. I was apparently the only person in the relationship who did not.

So I changed themes.

Except the old AI design followed me.

I reset the styles.

Nothing.

I reset the templates.

Nothing.

Eventually I discovered that the AI hadn’t put the homepage design in the theme or the template at all.

It had built an actual Home page containing the whole layout.

I deleted that.

Suddenly WordPress remembered how to be a blog.

Progress.

Then I discovered that a photo could exist in at least two philosophically distinct states: an image in the post and a featured image.

This distinction mattered because one of them was displaying nicely in the article while the other was appearing as a tiny mysterious duplicate next to the title.

Naturally, the tiny one could not be deleted from the place where I was looking at it.

Because why would it?

At one point I thought, Fine. I know HTML and CSS. I’ll just fix this myself.

WordPress’s response was essentially:

Sure. The CSS is behind three menus and a button with three dots.

I realize I sound approximately 900 years old right now, but there was a time when blogging software worked like this:

Title

Words

Picture

Publish

That was more or less the whole product.

Anyway, after several hours of archaeological excavation inside the software I had chosen to document my archaeological excavations, I found a theme called Perenne.

Its whole idea is that a blog should feel like a journal. The homepage is mostly dates. Posts look a little like field notes or a screenplay. Pictures stay secondary to the writing. It gets more interesting as entries accumulate.

Basically, it was what I had been trying to force WordPress to become all morning.

So I’m leaving it alone.

This is an important new rule for Wygle Wide Web:

If the website currently displays words in the correct order, do not touch the website.

The good news is that I also managed to connect ChatGPT directly to WordPress today.

Which means there is a reasonable chance that, from now on, I can spend less time learning what a “synced pattern” is and more time actually writing.

That feels like progress.

Filed from the WordPress mines,
Adam