Things haven’t exactly gone smooth here on Freezenet, so I wanted to update you on what all is happening.
So, things haven’t exactly been smooth sailing in the last six months. In January, I announced the website 4.0 design. While there wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with the previous design, I felt that it was time to move on to a more modern look. I had heard the complaints that the overall look was dated. Some people commented that the font choice was not the greatest. With having used the same look for many years now, it made sense to me to update to a more modern look.
Gutenberg Block Editor
Now, before I go any further, I wanted to point out another seemingly unrelated development that has happened as well. Don’t worry, I promise, this will all tie together. In 2019, WordPress (the technology running the behind the scenes stuff for the main part of the website) pushed Gutenberg onto those using the Content Management System (CMS). It had been in the works for a long time by that point and, up to that point, I had largely ignored it. The simple reason was that the editor I had grown accustomed to Since 2007 worked for me.
The reason why the older editor worked for me was that I could switch between a visual mode and a plain text mode. The latter was huge because I could simply use that mode, insert bare HTML as I wrote articles, and publish. If there was an error somewhere along the line (no, I’m human and not perfect), I could simply go back, look at the code, spot the obvious problem, and make the change. What’s more, it was streamlined. If I hit publish, the CMS didn’t second guess me or anything. It just did what I asked for. I was perfectly content with this editor and saw no reason to change.
Of course, there was one problem. WordPress had other ideas. They figured that their “revolutionary” way of creating posts was better. They believed it so much so that they had forced the change. I had legitimately believed that when WordPress was rolling it out, there would be a toggle between the old style editor and the new style editor. That was not to be as the old editor was outright disabled during the push. When the updates hit Freezenet, I scoured the options for hours trying to find the setting to bring back the editor. However, no such option existed.
So, I had made the decision, at the time, to try and at least make the Gutenberg block editor work for me. Maybe I’m being old here. Maybe I could get used to the new editor. Naturally, I gave the new editor a shot. When I had opened the new editor, I was immediately lost. How do I set a featured image? Where do I add the “more” code so I could tell the theme that the by-line had ended? What the heck is with this “block” business anyway? I just wanted to write a news article and be done with it.
I then took the surreal step of looking for a guide to teach me something I had done for 14 years by that point in time: how do I write an article online on my own website? The guides I had found bombarded me with features I had no intention of using. I didn’t have any reason to create a massive photo gallery. I don’t even remember the last time I had put together a massive table in WordPress. At one point was I ever going to create a multi-column article? Yet, the guides were shoving that into my face, pretending that a beginning just absolutely needed to know these things.
At the same time, it the guides did next to nothing to answer most of my questions. Ironically, I found on my own how to insert a featured picture after sifting through the features. Of all the guides I had found at the time, none of them really told me anything about something as basic as a featured picture. Again, these guides are supposedly for beginners here, yet they aren’t teaching some of the most basic things. I was suffering from two problems: the Gutenberg block editor was anything but intuitive for me and the guides were equally worthless. Frustrated, I published an article saying that the block editor was simply not ready for prime time despite it being a forced change onto users (not too dissimilar to Windows 10 at the time, really).
What I had done next would potentially be something that may be having ramifications. I had installed the Disable Gutenberg plugin. It brought back the classic editor. Everything I had known came back and publishing articles became a virtually friction free process. Judging by the feedback of the plugin, many others were calling it a godsend. There were 5 star reviews everywhere. People were very happy that a plugin like this exists so they can get the old features back again. Others liked it because it worked great for older WordPress installs. Believe me, I was just another very happy customer.
The additional practical benefit was that I was continually putting in reps for remembering how to code in HTML. Inserting a URL continues to be second nature to me in HTML. Adding in headings was something I was fluent in. If I ever needed to do some real HTML coding, it wouldn’t take much to actually pick it back up again. Since this was happening as I was writing articles, no additional time was being used up in the process. It was a huge win/win for me.
My thinking, at the time, that maybe in a few years, I could spend some time going back to Gutenberg to try and learn it after much needed improvements were made. In the interim, I’ll just continue to use the classic editor. Well, I had other projects take up my time. I started a YouTube channel, created a Mastodon account, built a Wiki project, and did many other things. I was always up to my ears in work and setting time aside to learn Gutenberg took a back seat for me.
The Unintended Consequences
I’m not sure it is 100% certain, but it seems highly likely at this point, but those choices made all those years ago are apparently coming back to bite me.
When creating the new theme, it would appear that the people creating the new site didn’t exactly have Disable Gutenberg in mind. I mean, I can’t really blame them. I am, after all, something of an unusual case. A lot of people out there using WordPress have long since switched to Gutenberg and I was statistically just a holdout in the grand scheme of things.
Indeed, throughout December, there was something of a “soft” launch of the new design. However, things went wrong and I was largely left with waiting on the developers to not only restore the data on my site, but also waiting on them to fix a number of errors that had somehow cropped up along the way.
In January, the errors were seemingly resolved, I had re-written a lost article, and I wrote the announcement, saying that the issues had finally been resolved and I could go back to business as usual. By the time I had finished writing that announcement, I was infinitely relieved that I had a working system on the site and I could continue to make this one of the best sources of news and information around.
Barely a month later, the front page stopped loading content. Parts of the sidebar was missing and the footer simply stopped appearing altogether. Since I was able to poke around in the editor of the front page, I took a look, but the content loaded fine in the editor. Yet, no amount of deleting the cache or saving the “working” version of the page resolved the issues. Since I was under the Dreamcare services still, I asked the developers what on earth is happening to my site. It was the most disarming feeling in the world. Something broke on my site and I had no means of fixing it.
Luckily, the developers were able to fix it, but it involved simply restoring a backup. This meant I had lost a week worth of data (hence the busted URLs for anything pointing to my analysis of the Online Harms bill). Fortunately, there are automated backups happening, so I had thought that it would be a simple matter of hitting a database restore. Apparently, this is not a typical scenario and the process involved something more complex to get the posts back.
Fortunately (yes, “fortunately”), there was a slight communication breakdown that occurred. I was left in the dark with what on earth was happening after the message of how the developers were just looking into getting the data back. Since the developers are a third party contractor set up by the hosting company, I did contact the hosting company, thinking they could help figure something out. My contact happily agreed to take a look at the situation as well.
Disable Gutenberg Blamed
As it turned out, the source of the problems that had been going on seems to revolve around the Disable Gutenberg plugin. The plugin I was happily plugging away on for years. I had known it was messing with the editor for fixing the front page, but I had concluded that if a change needed to be made on the front page, I could simply deactivate the Disable Gutenberg plugin, make the change, and turn the plugin back on to write articles again. Seemed reasonable to me, in theory.
Well, that would be workable had it not been for the likely possibility that it was messing with the code that was used by the developers. In an e-mail message I had received from my hosting company contact, this was apparently being blamed for the problems. Up until that e-mail, I had no idea that this was causing these problems. To paraphrase the hosting company, my work flow was inadvertently interfering with their workflow. More technically speaking, the plugin I was using was blamed for screwing with their code.
Learning Gutenberg
I had a choice at that point: either learn the Gutenberg block editor or start looking at other options. Since I was told that the developers are fixing the site out of courtesy (the project was technically closed in January), I had concluded that the path of least resistance for everyone involved moving forward was me sitting down and learning the Gutenberg block editor. In retrospect, this was probably a long time coming. I can’t say I was thrilled by this, having to relearn a whole new editor (as far as my workflow is concerned), but if this is the source of the problems the site has experienced for the last half of the year, I’m going to have to bite the bullet and learn to put up with this editor moving forward.
What you are reading right now is my first post in the Gutenberg editor. It wasn’t exactly the smoothest writing experience still, but I can say that it has been improved since it’s initial forced launch onto users all those years ago. I chose to use the “easy” visual editor before attempting the code editor for the first post. I still think it takes something that is dead simple and makes it unnecessarily complex. Having “helpful” blue boxes around paragraphs is still pretty distracting to me. What’s more, having to sift through two toolbars just to make a subheading seems completely insane to me when I could just type in an “H4” tag or a “strong” tag before. What’s more, having toolbar prompts covering the text in the above paragraph is pretty annoying as well. Still, I needed at least an ability to publish posts moving forward. If the code editor doesn’t work for me, I could still write stuff and that is immediately the most important thing for me.
An Apology
So, for those trying to access the content that was lost over that period of one week (most commonly, the analysis on the Online Harms bill), I’m sorry, you’re going to have to wait a little longer for that as the data gets retrieved. For those who have been anticipating the usual daily articles from me, that is still getting worked on as the data gets restored. You’ll see a rush of backdated articles coming soon once the data issue is resolved.
I would also like to apologize for things being anything but smooth around here. If Disable Gutenberg was ultimately the culprit to all of these problems (and it likely was), hopefully, this will be the last time issues arise. I will do my part and try to be more fluent in this Gutenberg block editor moving forward. I’m pretty sure the developers also would like this to be the last time we run into issues here as well.
Thank you for your patience.
