Why is nothing ever simple?????

I’ve been experimenting with this WordPress Blog with Wiki plugin. The idea was to make much more use of it as a blog, to keep notes and document projects. In theory this should work. It should provide a framework that I just have to feed text and graphics into. It should take care of the formatting and presentation. This is simply a tool. I don’t mind a small amount of setup, configuration and learning, but I don’t want to edit HTML, CSS and other hidden crap. I believe computers and software (the bigger projects) should now be beyond silly little things not working.

Today I decided to add a couple of wiki pages. Still finding my way around so I didn’t expect too much, just for the thing to accept my text and display it on a typical page using the same general look as the other pages. Isn’t that what a theme is all about?

The first thing to go wrong was that the editor decided not to word-wrap and I ended up with lines of text about 3 meters long and a slider bar along the bottom of the window. After more than an hour of browsing the internet and through wordpress admin pages it came right, but I’m not sure why. Maybe something to do with my looking at it in the view-html mode.

So off we go lets type in some shit. Next problem; the formatting is inconsistent and keeps changing. The heading change affects the whole page and not just the selected text. So back to the view-html mode and there are secret codes sprinkled throughout my notes. Some made sense and some didn’t. I copied the heading tags to the appropriate text lines, deleted a few apparently random tags and went back to the visual-mode. It looked good, I finally had a format that I liked so I hit publish.

The next step was to see if my ramblings had appeared where I expected and still looked OK.

Oh-Shit……. A whole afternoon and the “bleep bleep” headings have vanished.

Why does this crap happen ??????

I think as I get older, hours are shorter than they used to be and I seem to have more to do, I’m becoming much less tolerant of things that should be simple but are not. If you’re a wizz-bang web site developer I can understand the need for tags, secret codes and maybe even using a editor that looked old in the mid 1980s. But as a computer user who just wants to create a document that displays as it appeared in the WYSIWYG editor which has buttons for all the fancy features’ like a word processor I should not be tripped up by these secret codes. It’s a bit like buying a new car with satellite navigation and hypersonic cup-holders and then having to screw the spark plugs in whenever you want to use it.