mobile app

A Bone to Pick with WordPress

Fandango43 Comments

I have a few bones to pick with WordPress. Well, at least they finally seem to have resolved the on-again/off-again pingback issue. Good for doing whatever they had to do to fix, after a week, whatever they did to break pingbacks in the first place. That’s the good news.

But on to the not so good news. I just realized that at least one blogger I have been following for quite a while, I was no longer following. Apparently, unbeknownst to me and with no action on my part, WordPress has been arbitrarily dropping blogs I follow from my follow list. Because I follow around 170 blogs, it sometimes takes a while for me to realize that posts from bloggers I follow are not showing up in my Reader anymore. So if you notice that I used to like and comment on your posts, but I haven’t for a while, let me know. It’s very possible that WordPress arbitrarily purged your blog from the blogs I follow.

If you’ve been following my blog for a while you may also know that since November of 2020 I’ve had an issue with commenting on blogs that do not have “.wordpress.com” in their URLs. WordPress admits that it’s a bug, blames it on Apple’s iPhone security settings, and is doing nothing to address it. As a result, even though I’m logged into the WordPress iOS app, if I want to comment on someone’s blog, I have to enter my name, my email address, and my blog’s address. That takes me to another screen where I have to enter my blog’s password and offer to sacrifice my first born child in order for my comment to be posted on the blog.

That’s a real pain in the butt. But even worse are those blogs that warn that I must be logged in to comment. I am logged in, dammit, to the WordPress iOS app, so I don’t get what the problem is. And yet, for bloggers that have this setting under Discussions, I can’t leave a comment.

So, for those of you who have checked the setting, “Users must be registered and logged in to comment,” and you know who you are, even after I attempt to re-login (though I’m already logged in), I cannot comment on your posts when I visit your blog. I can only comment when I find it in my Reader if I’m following your blog.

But now, if I want to contact a happiness engineer to report these issues, do I do it via WordPress or Jetpack?

Many of us who have been blogging on WordPress from our smartphones or tablets are being told to delete that mobile app and install the Jetpack mobile app if we want all to keep using all of the features of WordPress. Why? Because as of March 8th, WordPress is “simplifying” its mobile app and dropping functionality that most of us use, such as stats, the Reader, notifications, the activity log, menus, and themes.

What? Everyone knows what WordPress is: the worlds largest, most popular web hosting site. Who the hell knows what Jetpack is? Why would the owners of a well known, highly regarded brand (WordPress) push most of us off to something few people have ever heard of? I don’t get it. Do you?

In Case I Missed You

Fandango26 Comments

My normal routine when I wake up in the morning, before I even drag myself out of bed, is to reach for my iPhone, open up my WordPress app, check how many views I’ve gotten so far, and then go to my Reader and start reading posts that come in overnight while I was sleeping from bloggers I follow.

I scroll back to the last post I read the night before and use that as my starting point. Then I start with the first post that came in after that last one.

But yesterday morning I noticed something disturbing in my WordPress Reader. There was a four hour gap between the last post I read the night before and the next post that appeared in my Reader.578BEDE7-856D-4587-A82E-97BE055135B5That’s weird, I thought. So I then opened up my iPhone’s Safari browser, logged into WordPress, went to my Reader, scrolled down to the last post I’d read the night before, and there was virtually no gap between the last post I read and the next post after that.1fc5dd7e-fd3d-4b94-99ff-1d4e50c9030f.jpegWTF? What happened to all of those posts in that four hour gap? Why aren’t they showing up in my WordPress app Reader but are showing up in my WordPress.com Safari browser Reader?

So I opened up a ticket with the Happiness Engineers and they said that I should “Try scrolling down in the ‘Followed Sites’ page in the mobile app. This will trigger an extra refresh.”

I tried that and it didn’t work. I responded back to let them know, but haven’t heard back yet.

So this is a long-winded (or verbose?) way of saying that it’s likely that I may have missed a bunch of your posts, particularly if you posted them between 11 pm and 7 am Pacific Time (US). I’m not sure how long this issue has been going on, but if you think you posted a “must read” post in the — or my — overnight hours, during the past few days, I probably didn’t see it. So feel free to include a link to any such posts in a comment on this post.

Thanks.