Why I am hating WordPress right now

You may have noticed that the look of the site has changed slightly.  You may also have noticed that the last 8 months of posts have disappeared from my blog.  The two are not unrelated.

I’m travelling this week, and figured that while I was holed up in my hotel room, it would be a good opportunity for me to write a little.  Logging in to the WordPress dashboard, I noticed that a new version was available.  “No time like the present!” I declared cheerfully, and proceeded to download it.

I then tried to follow the convoluted, unintuitive, and wildly vague instructions on the WordPress site.  The first thing I did, of course, was back up my blog.  To do otherwise would just be silly.

You know where this is going.  Somewhere in between the “delete some stuff” and “copy some stuff” instructions, the whole site went entirely to pot.  Attempting to browse to the site would yield exhuberant error messages of a tremendous variety.  After a couple of hours of struggling vainly to restore functionality, I gave up and decided to just wipe out the site and start from scratch.

So I reinstalled WordPress on my SiteGround-hosted site, and fired up the restore button.

It restored precisely one month of posts.  That’s it.  Everything I posted from March through to October is gonzo.

I spent the next several minutes kicking a pillow around my hotel room and trying to figure who (besides myself) I could blame so that I could imagine them personified in said pillow.  Unfortunately, the exercise did very little to make me feel much better.

So, here we are.  It’s a fresh start, I suppose, for Siege Curmudgeon.

Incidentally, having gone through this violence-inducing experience, as I was re-installing WordPress I noticed a little “Upgrade me!” link buried in the admin menus of the SiteGround user interface.  Evidently one click was all it would have taken.  Which brought to mind this line from The Wedding Singer.

I think I’m going to go out into the hall and punch the first person I meet.