Just an observation. Some thing that I noticed about how things have changed about wordpress, is the themes are not as user friendly as I remember. It’s not just blocks being nonsensical, most themes seem to be focused on commerce. Ether plugging a service, or merch. Not many themes that allow for anything else. Nothing wrong with someone selling merch I would be dropping merch too if I had a big enough reader base. After spending more then a week installing testing and uninstalling themes I’ve notice that most theme creators are so focused on commerce sites. they also have pay walling features, and have links to a paid Pro theme. chasing that dollar from hopeful entrepreneur. that someone wanting to create a blog today wouldn’t have much luck. I know no one blogs any more, fame is found on tiktok or youtube. Video rules the web these days. But there is still more things the web can be used for the peddling wares, feeding mega-corp algorithms, and porn.
One of the things that I am working out is a site that is a deposit of information. Collecting and organizing that information for other people to find and use is the point of the site. Yes we will be selling stuff. but only as a means of keeping the site going. Selling is not the main focus of the site. Almost every theme that I tested had a “blog” option. And marketing “classes” keep stressing that you can not get people into your web store unless you have a blog. This feels really really wrong. Just completely backwards. I come across stuff people have written to fill those kind of social media posts. There is no passion in how it’s written, and very little useful information.
I’m fully aware that this post on my backwater blog is nothing more then “old geek yells at cloud service.”
Oh yeah that usable theme this post was suppose to be about; Astra. After wasting a week of trial and error, I decided to google for “simple wordpress themes”. The results were rather telling. because the google results were useless and a waste of time too. So Redit. Someone asked “what is a good starter theme?” The most liked answer was “Astra”. I didn’t believe it because I tried it before and rejected it. so I looked it up on youtube. after a 5min video I could see how I could make the changes I needed, to make the site look more like what I wanted. No limited setting forcing me to stick to a page layout that is trying real hard to be amazon. but not get used.
Well this scratched my itch to complain about nothing important. thanks for reading.