WordPress & Getting "old" on the internet.

This is a lightly edited Cohost post.

I think I've officially "gotten older" when it comes to being online. I was looking to start making blog posts on WordPress for my YouTube "brand" Implausibly Average (I feel the need, once more, to have a webbed site) and remembered Implausibly Average has a WordPress that hasn't been touched in years. So, I log in and start shuffling things around, seeing what themes I can put on this free blog, seeing how posting works now, and... it all sucks.

When I was in high school (2008-2012) I had a class that introduced me to WordPress. I remember blog templates being a header, a menu, and then a couple columns of Content that you could setup. Here's a crude Artists Rendition:

Now they're all... endless scrolling sludge? Like, everything is based around having lots of empty/useless space. It doesn't look like a blog anymore, it looks like an endless stream of Posts. I don't know, it just feels... bad? Here's the best I could make the blog look:

And this doesn't even touch how the editor looks now. This is what it looked like, or what I remember it looking like:

Now it looks like this:

Look at all that empty space! You're completely closed off from the rest of WordPress, just in The Posting Void.

I don't wanna use this website. I don't like what WordPress's assumptions of a blog are. It's horrible to use. I want it back to how I envisioned it in my head.

And that's when it really hit me that I'm just old now. Well, older. I'm not even 30 (yet!), but the internet of my youth is gone in a big way. This may not be accurate, but my perception is that I'm right on the dividing line between "you're just throwing stuff up in HTML on a geocities site" and "every website wants to be The Website". I remember WordPress having a sweet spot between being able to dig into code easily or just using what's out of the box to look like a Proper Blog. I remember something similar with other blogging sites at the time. I remember being on MySpace at the end, and making shitty flash player playlists of songs and making my theme look like a nightmare. I remember making a WordPress site for my webcomic. I remember it all being just enough where I, an impatient teen at the time, could do just enough out of the box with most free web services to make a website look unique and cool and whatever.

The aesthetics of Online changed and it's frustrating! I can only imagine how much more frustrating it is to people older than me, who have better memories of the things before my time that are even more long gone. Shit sucks.

Edit 2023/11/17: Fixed broken image links