WordPress, or Bust?

I have not posted in months because I have been avoiding it. I have several things that I can post.  I am still having problems using the WordPress interface. It is more complicated than I remember it being years ago. I have problems simply posting a mixed blog entry of images and text. Of course, I am using the free version of the site.

In September, I talked to Jonas LG Karlsson, the master carver of watermelons, pumpkins, and any other things you can carve, and his wife, Lindsay. They live in Sleepy Hollow. He’s done some wonderful carvings, and the Historical Society had three carving classes at the beginning of the month to celebrate the upcoming change of season. They mentioned their use of the free WordPress and how much trouble they were having with it. (It was not intuitive; it was hard to use.) The only reason they had picked it, they told me, was because everyone they talked to had suggested it. I felt vindicated and told them of my problems as well.

A few weeks ago, I returned to the ACRL/NY Executive Board as the chair of the Graduate Services Discussion Group. I had maintained a separate blog for the group and a few other pages for ACRL/NY-related discussion groups that I had been involved with. The blog had been abandoned and the GSDG site had the last posting dated 2017. I decided to clean it up and asked a colleague at the GC with WordPress experience to help me.

He was perplexed at how difficult it was to delete a site. We never did find out if I could delete a site without deleting the entire blog, but he did discover how to suppress the other sites that were no longer being used. He said that functionality seems to be limited in the free version. One would think that WordPress would want to make its free version as easy to use to entice more people to use the product, but as my boss said, they have the major market share. WordPress has no interest in drawing additional business because people already come to them.

CUNY has the Academic Commons site that is a paid WordPress site. My boss and my colleague are familiar with the Commons. As a faculty member, I have the right to have a website of my own on the Commons, and it need not be live. Currently, my information on that site refers to this one if anyone has an interest in me and my work. What I am going to do is create a test website but make it private and experiment with a variety of things.

I have hundreds of posts on my blog spread over four sites and I don’t want to simply abandon the blog or delete it. (It pains me to see abandoned sites.) If it turns out that the paid WordPress is easier to use, then I may just bite the bullet and pay for the site. If not, then I’ll have to think about whether or not I want to continue to have a web presence like a blog.

Stay tuned.