Hi friends! I was recently working on a silly post about stock photos when I, once again, ran afoul of WordPress’s blog post drafter. I had about 60-70% of it written the other night, but WordPress seems to hate its users — or at least me.

A few years ago, WordPress shifted from a traditional text editor like the kind you’d find on basically every other blogging platform on the internet to a new page builder called “Gutenberg”. With Gutenberg, a person can easily build pages and blog posts by placing self-contained elements called “blocks” within a page. It’s meant to cut out a lot of the more difficult stuff that can come with web design and web layout — no more back end coding in order to get your website to be formatted the way you wish. You can quickly build a page and adjust the layout by clicking and dragging elements around.

To be clear, I think this is a fine idea, and I’ve found that Gutenberg can be pretty nice for some things, such as adding non-text elements like images — giving you the option to add galleries, embed URLs so they display nicely, and other things. Images, in particular, have caused me some frustration in the past — you drop an image into your text and suddenly the formatting goes all wonky hard to read. And of course, they’re never displayed in an area that makes sense within the context of the blog post.

With that said, while the non-text media stuff is great, this is a blog, and one that mostly relies on text. Y’know — the written word! Unfortunately, the post body is not treated as a separate element or containerized. If it were treated similar to how Microsoft Word will let you insert text boxes and drag and drop them wherever you’d prefer while also having a standard text layout because it’s a word processor, that’d be great. Instead, however, each paragraph is treated as individual elements. In fact, anytime you want to do anything text related, it’s a new element. Each paragraph is a block. Each bulleted list is a block. Headers are blocks. This means they’re all containerized away from each other, which makes navigating between multiple paragraphs extremely difficult.

More specifically, and maybe this is just a me problem, but I use Windows CTRL hot keys pretty regularly because I’m a millennial and I was basically raised on computers. Meaning using CTRL+left/right arrow to hop quickly through words instead of through letters and characters; using CTRL+backspace to delete whole words rather than backspacing by character; using CTRL+up/down arrows to jump by paragraph. While those hot key options sort of work, I can only use them in each element, not across elements. CTRL+left and right works, but CTRL+up/down just takes me to the start of a line. When I’ve tried to highlight multiple paragraphs of text and copy/paste/delete/format them together, once I move out of one element, it then highlights the whole element instead of treating them as paragraphs.

Are there other options? No! Well, technically there’s the “classic editor” block, where within the Gutenberg page builder, I can create a single block in which to contain multiple paragraphs of text and/or other media. However, while it handles paragraphs of text well enough, the moment I introduce non-text elements, they start fucking up the layout of the rest of the post.

Now, let’s say you’re a millennial and you click on an image to remove from your classic element because the image has utterly fucked the post layout and made it a complete eyesore to read and you’ve resigned yourself to biting the bullet and just using their goddamned Gutenberg image block. You CTRL+X to cut the image because you’re millennial and that’s how computers have worked for fucking decades, but instead of cutting the single image you have selected, it instead cuts the entire classic editor block, and with it, your entire post! Gone in an instant.

Thankfully, you’re a millennial and you know that if you press CTRL+Z, you can undo your mistake. But wait! Nope! Oops! Your post has auto-saved this change, pressing CTRL+Z does nothing, and there’s no way that you can find to recover the last two hours of work! So you try CTRL+V to paste the block back — actually no! Rather than cutting the element or text or what have you and saving it into the clipboard, it has just deleted the entire element from existence. Fuck you for thinking things would be that easy!

I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I haven’t really blogged much over the past few years, so I’m not only out of practice, but inexperienced with the Gutenberg editor — my dislike of it is part of what made me blog less often. That and how converting to the Gutenberg editor made the formatting on all of my older posts suddenly shit the bed.

Thank you for indulging this petulant whining. Next time will be sillier and more fun, I swear!

‘Til next time.

Edit, 12/19/2022: while working on the next blog post about my D&D character, I ran into and remembered another beef I have with the goddamned Gutenberg editor: once a post goes over a certain length or has a certain number of elements on a page, it starts to freak out — the text as I’m typing starts to load slower, and I can type whole sentences before any text actually populates on screen. It’s not doing it on this post, but if I were to keep expanding it, I’d quickly start out-typing the text appearing on my screen. Love it when text editors start lagging when you add too much text!