Last night I was catching up on reading some blogs before supper. My friend Ashley at Mental Health @ Home (you should really check out her blog if you haven’t already) posted something about checking your blog to see how easy it is to find and follow. I figured it’s been a couple years, why not? I was appalled with what I found. My theme was gone and there was nothing there but a plain white background. My follow button along with all my archived blog posts were gone as well. I just about died.
Of course it had to happen when I didn’t have hours to fix it. My husband was making homemade pizza and the kids were visiting after supper. Not only that, my search engine had some sort of child safety lock on it which I couldn’t seem to turn off. I was in a horrible mood which spiraled into my total hatred of technology making me sound like a bitter old lady to the twenty agers. Nothing makes me feel older or stupider than not being able to make something work and having to have my kids help me.
It’s my own fault. I should check my blog more often. To me going on my site is as repulsive as watching a video of myself singing, and I am a pretty good singer. It’s a cringeworthy form of torture. So needless to say I didn’t sleep very well last night.
I think for my age my computer literacy is average. I always learned what I needed to know to be able to get by. But quite frankly I’m old school traditional. I have a calendar I keep on the wall to keep track of appointments. I like to read books that are made out of trees. My blog is very basic. I update my profile picture every two years. I have had the same cover photo since I started once I stopped using the theme picture.
I don’t like change. I don’t like useless updates. If something is not broken, why fix it?? Why not stick with the tried and true? Do you really think I care if the search bar is at the top or the bottom of my phone screen? If updated was better that would be one thing. But usually it’s frustrating because I have to learn a new way of doing things after finally figuring out the old way which was a million times better. It’s almost as if they are doing updates just to look good for doing updates.
Thankfully I was able to take the kid friendly setting off my searches. That whole thing was a crock anyway when my kids were young. I had to have my kids set up the parental controls which was useless. I pretended they worked and they pretended they couldn’t get around them.
This morning I updated my blog. I found out my theme was rewritten and that is why I had a blank screen. My archives and follow button were old and inactivated widgets. Everything was just garbage and I was tempted to just delete the whole damn thing. But I figured it out without having to have my children hold my hand. It just drives me crazy though! I have no idea how long it was like that.
Thanks Ashley for prompting me to check out my own blog. Besides being frustrated with my own blog, nothing frustrates me more than wanting to follow a new blog and being unable to because it just isn’t user friendly.
I’ve noticed other glitches too over the last couple weeks. I have somehow unfollowed blogs accidently and sometimes when I like someone’s post it shows up later that I didn’t like it. I also stopped receiving notifications, although it is turned on both on my phone and WP.
I am not as computer literate as I would like to be, but I will keep on trying.
I do most of my reading in the Reader, so I often have no idea what people’s actual sites look like. I’ve learned to check my site on a somewhat regular basis, but it hasn’t really sunk into my head that I should do this on mobile as well as on desktop, and sometimes I’ll stumble across things that are a mess on mobile despite looking just fine on desktop.
I know of another blogger that recently learned that their theme no longer existed. They had a different theme than you have, but it was the same kind of thing that a revamped version had been created.
A little while back WordPress switched the widget areas from old-style widgets to blocks, and I think that ended up breaking some blogs’ widgets altogether.
WordPress seems like they’re particularly keen on fixing things that aren’t broken, and then breaking them in the process.
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It drives me absolutely crazy!!! That is exactly what happened and I had no idea. Thanks for posting about it otherwise who knows when I would’ve noticed it. I do check it every once in awhile but it’s probably been longer than I thought.
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You know I’m going to check my blog now…
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Good idea! Let me know how it goes. It’s strange but it was your blog I somehow unfollowed a couple weeks back. I noticed you hadn’t posted in a couple days and realized I wasn’t following you anymore. How do these things even happen without us noticing?
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