Oh my God, I ran automated updates on the blog Friday afternoon without realizing that it was also going to update WordPress to version 5.0. So when I started to write a post that evening, I was met with this monstrosity:

WordPress has been threatening us with their new Gutenberg editor for months now, and I guess it’s finally arrived, despite the fact that the trial Gutenberg plugin has been getting abysmal reviews.

What the hell were they thinking? Gutenberg is trying to be some kind of low-rent page builder, allowing users to drag and drop feature blocks into a page. People who use WordPress to build commerce sites love that sort of thing, because it gives them complete control over the design of every page on an individual basis. I use WordPress for blogging, however, so I hated Gutenberg on sight.

Look, I just want to write stuff. I don’t want or need to make every single page look unique and different. Blogging for me is about content, not visual design.

When WordPress started talking about Gutenberg, I ignored it, because it figured it would just be another editor. I didn’t expect such a drastic change. I didn’t expect that I would have to stop and learn a new way of posting stuff. In essence, WordPress Gutenberg has broken the fundamental workflow of blogging: Open the page and start writing.

In the long run, It’s not going to be a huge deal for me. I deal with technical blogging stuff all the time, and I’ve worked with page builders before, so I’m sure I’ll get used to it. But I suspect some of the more curmudgeony bloggers out there (I’m looking at you, Greenfield!) are going to hate this change.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: Go back to the old editor with the Classic Editor plugin:

Note that it has already been installed by over 700,000 users. I’m one of them. I threw this post together in a few minutes in the old editor.

Update: If you only want to disable Gutenberg for some of the users on your blog, there’s the Disable Gutenberg plugin, which gives you detailed control over when and for whom Gutenberg is active.

It all began to go wrong when I started writing a post for Maggie’s Friday the 13th call for support, about how the sex work community on Twitter was responding to the one-two punch of FOSTA/SESTA and the Backpage raid. The post needed a lot embedded tweets from sex workers, and while I was reviewing the post I noticed something odd: My blog was not displaying the tweets correctly.

Normally, an embedded tweet pretty closely resembles the appearance of a tweet in Twitter. For example, tweeting the title of this post should look something like this:

But when I previewed the post, the embedded tweets looked more like this:

That layout, with the author’s name coming after the content, looks like the way the HTML is sent to the browser before it is styled. The tweet styling must be applied afterward, probably by some JavaScript, and for some reason, the script isn’t styling the tweet correctly. Weirdly, however, if you look at the same post on the main blog page, the tweets look like they’re supposed to. They also look like they’re supposed to if I switch the blog to one of the standard themes that comes with WordPress. All of this points to a problem with the theme I’m using.

It’s not that simple though, because I’m using the Headway theme framework. That’s a very cool tool which allows me to visually design custom themes. However, when I fired up the Headway Visual Editor, I saw that I was using a shared set of styling rules for the main page and the individual post pages, so they should be rendered the same. But clearly they’re not. This was beginning to smell like some kind of bug in how Headway renders single post pages.

Before going further down that road, I wanted to make sure I was running the most up-to-date version of the framework. It’s supposed to be updated automatically, but of the update failed, an old version of the theme framework might not work quite right on newer versions of WordPress. As it turns out, when I logged in to the Headway site to see if I was using the latest version, I got an unpleasant surprise: Headway’s most recent release of the theme framework was version 3.8.9…released in October, 2016.

Crap. It looks like Headway essentially went out of business a year and a half ago and tried to keep their customers from noticing. Rumor has it that Headway ran through all their money too fast and had to lay off almost everybody, leaving just enough of the company operational to allow them to keep collecting licensing fees through the website. This is sneaky, desperate, and underhanded.

(It’s a darned shame too, because Headway did so much right. Most WordPress page building tools are aimed at designers building small storefront sites, so they are focused on allowing designers to make each page unique, like an online brochure layout. Headway is different, because it works through the WordPress theme system. You don’t build pages, you build themes which can be applied to all your pages and blog posts at once. Yet you can also do page building by creating a unique theme variant for each page. And despite all that, it rendered pages very fast.)

So now I’ve been looking through the morass of WordPress theme frameworks — Genesis, Divi, Themify, Builder, PageLines, Ultimatum — the list goes on and on. It’s hard to tell, but some of them appear to have gone the way of Headway. Meanwhile, I’m trying stuff and experimenting.

So if you see wild theme changes here on Windypundit, now you know why.

I seem to be having trouble blogging. My last post was on March 28th, an even 50 days ago. I think that’s one of the longest periods I’ve gone without posting since the very early days of the blog. I blogged more frequently than this throughout the months when my parents died.

Part of the reason for the reduced blogging is that I’ve been doing small projects around the house. We never really finished moving in, so I have a lot of catching up to do — unpacking boxes, moving furniture, putting things together. It uses up my spare time.

It also doesn’t help that my day job is changing. I’m taking on additional responsibilities, and I’m spending more time having to learn about some new technologies, which uses up more of my spare time. More importantly, it uses up my mental energy. Writing Windypundit is hard work. I have trouble finding the time to start new posts, and I have trouble keeping up the momentum it takes to finish a post.

(I have a bunch of partial posts from the last few weeks — taking The Federalist to task for attacking Elizabeth Nolan Brown, the dangers of weakening Section 230 protections, explaining why I’m skeptical of that study suggesting auto insurance pricing is racist, ranting about Jack Marshall’s ugly values, analysis of the Trump “tax plan,” a point that climate activists missed in Bret Stephens’s NYT piece, and a multi-part series on how insurance works. Some of those might still see daylight, but most are already too stale.)

There’s one other cause for my lack of blogging: The presidency of Donald Trump. Or rather, the difficulty I have in dealing coherently with the presidency of Donald Trump. I tend to blog about what might be called policy issues, and those aren’t much in the news these days.

That’s no surprise. My position has consistently been that Trump is a narcissistic sociopath. It’s not easy to talk about Trump’s policy preferences because he doesn’t have any beyond doing whatever is good for him. Heck, his “tax plan” consisted of a one page summary of provisions and some details given by his staff, and the provisions with the most details were the ones that would give Trump himself a big tax break.

I don’t know how to talk about policy ideas so vague and incomplete. Other pundits filled in the holes, but some of their assumptions were contradictory. Anything I wrote would be dependent on way too many assumptions to be useful.

The Republican healthcare plan was a lot more detailed — an actual bill before Congress — but even then it didn’t offer a solution to any of the major problems with Obamacare, nor did it deliver on Trump’s promises of much better healthcare plans. It just didn’t seem like serious policy, and that didn’t seem worth writing about, especially since non-serious policy could change when the wind blows.

In any case, both the tax plan and the healthcare plan were met with scathing responses from throughout the punditocracy. Much of the response was partisan, a little too much of it was crazy, and some of it I strongly disagreed with it. But all too often, by the time I caught up to the news cycle, everyone else had already said what I wanted to say, or close enough that I didn’t feel motivated to write.

That’s not to say there aren’t some real policy issues. Jeff Sessions all by himself is ramping up the war on drugs and shutting down criminal justice reform. I could certainly say things about that. But I’ve been saying things about that for a decade and a half, and everything I want to say right now boils down to “it’s very, very, very, very wrong to hurt people for committing consensual crimes.” That’s what I always say, and it doesn’t seem to be helping.

So right now it feels like everything I could write about anything going on is basically pointless.

I’m sure I’ll get over it. In part, I need to find better sources of news and information. I now realize that much of my daily skim was geared toward covering the liberal/leftist/Democratic establishment. I need to reorient my reading to find more interesting approaches to the sins of the conservative/right/Republican establishment. I’m not talking only about sites that attack the issues of the right. Sites that smugly defend them are just as useful for my purposes.

I also need to get away from the news cycle’s breathless coverage of every single Trump controversy. Potential scandals involving Russians, Comey, and Flynn may very well have an important, even devastating, effect on the Trump presidency, but they’re not what I want to blog about. I’m sure there are important policy changes going on — immigration is an obvious example — and I need to find out more about them.

Any suggestions?

Regular readers may know that I bought a house back in June and moved out to the suburbs, where we’re still getting used to a new way of living. Our condo needed a bit of work before we could sell it, but we finally got it ready and on the market in September, and we closed on the sale last month.

That brings me to a disturbing question: Since Chicago is “the windy city” and I no longer have any connection to Chicago…am I still the Windypundit? Is it time to change the name of the blog? Granted, Windypundit has never been about Chicago any more than Vodkapundit has been about vodka or Iowa Hawk Blog has been about birds of prey, but there was always a connection. Until now.

And that just has me thinking about the blog, which has been going on for a very long time now, and seems to be increasingly irrelevant. (For Christ’s sake, my last post advocated a type of “white genocide,” and nobody even bothered to call me a “cuck.”) Maybe it’s time to make some changes…

Should I change the name? “Windypundit” doesn’t exactly fill the reader with breathless anticipation of greatness.

Should I start a whole new blog? I tried that once before, when Rogier van Bakel, Rick Horowitz, and I tried to restart Rogier’s old blog in a new location (we even got Maggie McNeill in on it!), but after an initial burst of activity and buzz, it eventually ground to a halt.

Should I join another group blog, if anyone would have me? I tried doing that at When Falls the Coliseum, but I never got involved enough to post regularly. Somebody invited me to contribute to Being Libertarian, but I don’t know if that would be right for me.

So, as the year draws to a close and I contemplate the future of the blog, does anyone have suggestions? I’ve already thought of releasing all new posts as videos of bikini models reading them out loud, but any other suggestions would be given full consideration.

(And if you want to send me audition videos for the bikini thing…)