New and Improved!

Last week–or so… let’s not get carried away with accuracy–I ventured to equip m’blog with a random post generator. Don’t ask me why. Likely I was supposed to be doing something like cleaning out the couch, when the shiny prospect of Having a Fancy New Button caught my eye and entranced me with it’s wiles.

And I was off…

I did a bunch of research, ending in nothing but frustration, because as much as I love WordPress, I hate that they basically have two major modes of existence, and I can never keep them straight. There are the .commers, and there are the .orgers. There’re the self-hosted babies, and the freebie freeloaders. There are paid plans, then there are PAID plans. And no matter how many times it is laid out neatly for me, I do not ever understand what is going on and what I actually have at my disposal and do not.

So as with any dive into self-blogging improvement, I spent an inordinate amount of time reading about easy fixes that I Do Not Have Access To. Because I am of the cheapskate variety and do not live in the realms of those who can utilize plugins, or shortcodes, or Anything Cool.

When I was done, and consoling myself with the obvious fact that I will never have a random post generator, because I am not worthy of a random post generator, a tiny but very bright little flicker appeared up there in the vicinity of my noggin.

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You see, a while ago, I endeavored to switch over to the new Gutenberg editor.

OK, a few times, I endeavored to go all Gutenberg. They never went so well. To be fair, I was a beta-tester, and there were bugs. Many and assorted bugs, none of which I had the time, energy, nor skillset to overcome.

Nevertheless, a couple of months ago, after waiting an altogether arbitrary period of time, in which I hoped and prayed that all y’all smarter-than-me folks would have helped the old W-P to iron out the wrinkles in The Gutenberg, I tried one more time, with a bit more determination, and a bit more patience. I had to hone my meditation practice to be ready for this.

And I liked it.

Just like my youngest kiddo said I would, I liked it. But there were still a few glitches. Like my images only aligned to the left, no matter what I did. And, inexplicably, my image captions would only allow a width of one word. A caption of 13 words would look like a stack of bad haikus. Infuriating.

So what did I do?

I did the unthinkable.

I contacted WordPress.

I know. Revolutionary.

And they were super helpful! Happiness Engineers, no joke. They worked with me for days, tweaking this, messing with that, until they had added enough CSS to my site to overcome all the havoc that Gutenberg wreaked with my theme. It was great.

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So, back to my recent and obsessive need for a random post generator, and that tiny bright light… I decided to once again make history by asking for more help.

I am just so used to there being absolutely no support for anything these days, particularly if you’re flying in the lower free echelons of the radar.

But not with WordPress. They just help. It’s crazy.

So, a couple of big things finally happened this week.

#1 I got me my random post generator.

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Quick sidenote to derail the onslaught of inquiries:
Why, you ask, did I want a random post generator? Well, first off, because it sounded cool, and I wanted one. Which is reason enough.
After that, it was more my own desire to go back and hit old posts to see what I was up to back in the day. Randomly. Duh.
It had very little to do with you, the reader, though you are always on my mind.

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And how, you ask, is that feat of techno-magic possible?
Umm… 7 tiny characters at the end of your link url.
www.yourblog.com/?random
Really. That’s it.

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So.

That was cool.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy it as much as I do. 😉 *

And #2 I finally broke down and got m’self an ad-free blog. Upgraded to my very own domain, like a pro, and saved all you fine folks from ever having to wade through the stream of ridiculous advertisements. I’ve actually never seen them, but some of you tell me they’re pretty obnoxious. And far be it from me to subject you to obnoxious.

So feel free to update all your many links to kjottinger.com, to save yourself all that extra typing.

The things I do for you.

* To ensure you fully enjoy all the benefits that a random post generator can offer, this Wednesday, I’ll be officially beginning the Way Back Wednesday series, where I’ll be featuring one of the old blog posts that this modern marvel throws at me. You won’t even have to click the button. It’ll be great. Also, there is more than a small chance that it will be humiliating for me, so we’ve all got that to look forward to.

If you need me, I’ll be looking for something new to obsess over, to avoid the laundry,
KJ