My near-death brush with WordPress

I had been thinking of starting a blog for many years, but something or the other kept coming up and I kept procrastinating. Last week, I caught a bad cold and took a few days off work. In order to use the down time productively, I decided to finally start my own blog.

I felt that it was something that would live on in the cyberspace forever – that could be the reason why Mr. Bachchan religiously records the day number (Day 3688, Day 3689, etc.) on every post on his official blog – so where to host my blog was a decision that I couldn't take lightly. I started a meticulous research on Google, reading and learning about Tumblr, Wix, Medium, Blogger, Squarespace and WordPress. What finally convinced me about WordPress was the information that around 30% of the blogs are on WordPress, and secondly it was 'easy to use and manage', with its 'famous five-minute installation'.

Okay, so WordPress it was going to be. I decided to buy a domain name and storage space, because I wanted to own my website. Luckily, I got my name as domain name and bought hosting for a couple of years from Bluehost, the company recommended by WordPress. I was on cloud nine, ready to make my mark on the world of blogging, completely oblivious to the nightmare awaiting me.

After having purchased the domain name and hosting, I rushed to WordPress, eager to start my blog. I was naïve enough to assume that it would be an easy do-it-yourself ten-minute drag-and-drop process. I searched the whole site, but there was no magic button I could click on to create my blog site.

I went back to Google, and found that it was a slightly more complicated process than that. I was supposed to download and install a web server package called XXAMP. Even after multiple attempts, it refused to install on my computer. I should have gotten the hint then, but I ploughed on, determined to create my blog website that very day.

I found an alternative, WAMP server package, which installed on the first attempt on my computer. The next step was downloading and installing WordPress, for which I had to watch a couple of Youtube videos. What happened to clicking on the good old .exe file and then clicking the ok-yes-yes-finish buttons? Anyway, after having created the website with the available templates, I discovered that taking all that stuff online was another complicated process. By now I had worked 10 hours straight, and my cold had turned from bad to worse. So I decided to tackle the remaining part of the process the next day.

I was feeling depressed when I woke up the next day, weighed down by the difficult task ahead. I turned on my computer and started learning how to take the website hosted on my computer online. The rest of the day was full of disasters. The picture I had used for the background had disappeared. I didn’t like the design I had selected the previous day and started re-designing. WordPress kept telling me I was using a wrong user name and password. Bluehost was slow as a snail.

After six hours I was feeling mildly suicidal. My cold was killing me, and I had a headache. My family members were giving each other concerned looks and treading lightly around me – there’s something very dangerous about an Aries who’s in a foul mood and not talking.

Finally, I gave it up. This was one wall that the ram inside me decided to leave alone. It was wiser to cut my losses and run. And that was when I turned to Blogger, the site owned and managed by that good old friend Google. It took me about ten minutes to have my blog up and running.

The advice I would like to give to all my friends who want to blog is to stay the hell away from WordPress. It is for nerds and computer engineers, not for people who want to write. If you are not comfortable with finding file paths, renaming directories, creating and moving databases around, playing admin, editing software files using notepad, using FTP (File Transfer Protocol, you dummy), and installing and learning to use unheard of softwares at every step, then WordPress is not for you. It is not a ‘five-minute installation’; instead, it’s more like a ‘five-DAY installation’ and that too if you are lucky enough to find the right tutorials on the Internet and if you take necessary precautions, such as keeping all sharp objects out of reach and having somebody keep a suicide watch over you.

When WordPress is so damn difficult to work with, why does everybody keep saying it’s easy? Was I the only one feeling exasperated by the WordPress experience? I performed a Google search, and out tumbled horror stories of innocent amateurs who’ve been devastated by WordPress. One guy said he had wasted a whole year trying to design his WordPress site for his newly opened business, the business had failed, and he was now ready to pay somebody to design the site for him. There was one youngster who used the choicest of abuses for WordPress and hoped it became obsolete and died soon. It was a relief to know that I was not alone in being thoroughly disappointed with WordPress and its completely, outrageously false claim of being easy to install and use.

I thank you, God, for leading me to Blogger.com, and I promise I’ll try to be a better human being.