Matt sounds just as off the rails as WordPress. Keep fiddling. WordPress was better 10 years ago. One person could set it up, add content and have a working site. I was there, I made my own sites and fixed the odd glitch, myself solo, just me. Those days are long gone. Keep adding more clutter, more complicated balderdash... requiring more plugins, FSE that doesn't even make sense, and taking anything useful out of the core so it can be marketed. Good going. I changed from Movable Type to WP when it was new. I moved on from WP now and I won't be back. Its like watching Rome burn itself into the ground. It didn't need to happen.

This is my comment from Reddit - Continuing the trend: Matt Mullenweg Says “The Wheels Have Fallen Off” in Wide-Ranging WordPress Critique

Being a WordPress fan/ user/ seller forum, they might not leave it up very long. Most people in that forum are using WordPress to con people into thinking they can't put up and run their own site. They can't - with WordPress.

It's designed to break, to be over complicated, and make money for WordPress developers who can't develop anything outside of WordPress itself. There is a whole cosmos of WordPress professionals who will be out of a career if WordPress became as unpopular as it should be.

People who want a site up for themselves or a business do not know what a mess WordPress is versus almost any other CMS. If they knew how simple most other CMS's are, they would desert WP in masses over night. But, a lot of people are making a great deal of money selling WordPress. Predators and parasites - preying on people who think WordPress is the only answer and making their plugins and themes a necessity because WordPress can't even work with anything simple and do-able any more.

That may be a bit harsh, but essentially its true. If you're in doubt, dump WordPress, pick another CMS and find out for yourself. You can make and run your own website, if you stop using WordPress.

WordPress can't even find the rails at this point. I began using WP when it was new, earliest versions. It was pretty easy once you got the hang of the basics. Now... What a damn mess. I use Chyrp Lite for my own site now. It's not fancy, uses markdown, and is so easy to use its almost silly.

I can still make my own basic site with HTML but I can not even figure out where to start with a theme for/in WP now. Themes and plugins used to be good and actually WORK. Imagine that! Now they all have their hands out (I don't blame them for trying to make a buck, but at least offer something that is worth having).

I'm helping a non-profit update their site. Its a mess of extra images, pages leftover from plugins. Plugins that no one knows why they are there. But, they do not want to change from using WP because that's what they have been told to use. "Everyone" uses WordPress. But they don't really. They hire people, they buy plugins and themes and then pray it somehow works. Its not working. The site looks misshapen and broken. The original theme is long outdated and does not work well with WP as it is now. Plugins are like a nest of tangled snakes, so twisted that its hard to get them to work. They are on top of each other.

I loathe content blocks. Why does anyone need to add more useless code to a website? Especially code that only works to make WP more complicated. Why does anyone need all that junk? Does it make your site faster, no way. Does it make your site easier to create or maintain, no. ClassicPress is a fork from before the content blocks. It works without having to understand this FSE quagmire. You can type in your content, save it and be done. In WordPress I spend more time dealing with content blocks that do a really great job of blocking me from posting anything. Super frustrating for no reason.

If the general public weren't so sold on WordPress being a must have, I'm sure they would find it drastically easier to use almost anything else. Blogger/ blogspot is all but mothballed but is far easier to use and get a site up in a few minutes. Most businesses/ people do not need a complicated site with features they can't really understand. Anyway, good for you Matt and WP. You created a bloated monster, over due for a big crash.

Could be used for a Halloween or year round horror site.

Zombie Apocalypse is a dark and bloody theme with zombie inspired graphics and with a horror film look to it packed in a very clean, responsive layout and cross-browser compatibility.

Source: Zombie Apocalypse Wordpress Theme - Cryout Creations

I've got two links to share:

• Markup Markdown
• HTML to Markdown Converter

Both have been great. The Markup Markdown plugin could use some tweaking. Mainly, the editing window does not keep the editing toolbar in view. So, if I need something I have to go all the way back up on my screen and then all the way back down again. Mostly this is when I'm typing in a URL, because it is still easier to have the software/ editor add the code than type it in myself (I don't always catch typos in the code when I do it myself).

I think a personal website is an online page (or more) created to share interests without marketing at people. Usually, its a simple site. Almost something I could build myself (at first glance anyway) limited as I am with plain HTML skills and a dash of CSS, maybe some javascript. Well not really, but I'm not 100% clueless about javascript.

There are less personal websites, or are they just so much harder to find? It could be either way. I tend to find ideas, links, and groups for personal site makers in clusters. Start somewhere and follow the trail with all sorts of interesting and unique stops along the way. So, here are the latest I have found. Some are more for people with knowledge beyond mine: developers and programmers who do not make cookie cutter stuff for WordPress. I don't make stuff for WordPress, but it seems phony (to me) when people call themselves web designers and only know how to deal with WordPress (not always well). I may as well call myself a web designer if that was all there is to it.

Octothorp - Github link

Octothorpes are hashtags and backlinks that can be used on regular websites, connecting pages across the open internet regardless of where they're hosted.

Octothorp is redeveloping/ bringing back the blogroll and webring idea. I think its improved a little. People shouldn't need to update every link in the ring, there should be some automation (as far as I have understood it) that would stop showing a link if it disappears. This was one problem with the old blogrolls/ webrings.

Do you know, the original webring is still online? You may never have heard of it, even if you are as old as I am.

Expanding Unidirectional Ring Of Pages

EUROPa is a different way to connect up and explore the World-Wide Web. It was started at Imperial College, London, UK on 1994-12-22 by Denis Howe just to see how far it would spread.

Blag

blag is a blog-aware, static site generator -- it uses Markdown and is written in Python.

Blag might be even simpler than Chryp Lite, which I'm using now. But, I don't think it is simple enough for me to work with. You need to open up terminals in your OS. I used to do that when I had Ubuntu Linux. But, its been years since I was able to get Ubuntu to work on any computer I have bought (retail) in a long time. I'd go back to Ubuntu, if I could save everything (kind of a big job). Then remove MS Windows, which the PC is not keen on allowing. Installing Ubuntu was not hard, or difficult. Using it was easier than Windows really. Plus, I could laugh at sites claiming I've been attacked by MS Windows in some way. If you are running Linux, you might like to try Blag.

11ty - Eleventy is a static site generator. Requires javascript and being able to run things in your computer terminal. It looks nice and clean but... not so simple as I would like these days.

Bukmark Club - "To be eligible for a listing in this directory, a website must have a curated collection of bookmarks and/or links to other websites".

I have had so many collections of links for assorted topics. It comes from all the years of editing at The Open Directory Project, now Curlie.org. Unless you just have a handful of links, its is a LOT of work to keep a collection of links updated. You need something to help you go through and find any which are broken. But, I'd still like to update some of my pages of links and add them to this directory. :)

Places to list your personal website:

• HTTV - Hypertext TV
• BlogScroll
• A Website is a Room
• Personal Site .es
• URL. Town
• Gossip's Web - "the directory of handmade webpages"
• The Wild Wild Web
• smallweb

Description of a personal website which I thought was a bit rough around the edges but worked:

The entries on this website were written to be written and not necessarily to be read. While they have been made public, the same could be said of garbage bags discarded in the woods or stomach contents expelled against a wall. The author expects nothing from the reader and asks only to be accorded the same courtesy.

Rationale More from the same person, on another of his sites.

There is something inherently suspect about publicly volunteering information without being asked or provoked. Anyone who engages in such behavior bears the burden of explaining why they chose to do so rather than remain silent. In the absence of a satisfying justification, silence must appear far preferable.

Starting a personal website such as this one may come across as presumptuous or arrogant, provided there is no evidence of prior interest in one’s person. The author of such a website appears to be making an implicit claim that it will be useful, interesting, or relevant to someone else. It is only natural to expect them to defend this claim.

I regret to say that any justification I can provide will likely be insufficient and disappointing. At the time of writing, I have no reason to believe there exists any general interest in myself. Moreover, I most emphatically do not believe that such interest ought to exist. I do not particularly wish to be known. I have nothing particularly important to say. I am not even particularly interested in the general concept of communication with others.

The truth is that I created this website for purely personal reasons. I view it as an experiment in proving to myself that I, in fact, do exist, and that there is something that could be said about myself. I needed this because I tend to consistently doubt these two points.

It could be argued that I could have achieved the same result by writing some facts about myself on a loose piece of paper or by digging a hole in the ground and shouting the facts into it, rather than publishing them on the web for the whole world to see. This is a sound argument. In response, I can only offer a vague intuition that proving one’s existence must have something to do with establishing an objectively verifiable presence in the external world.

I assume you have visited this website of your own volition. I am afraid you will have to furnish your own reasons for reading its contents, and if none can be found, you have only yourself to blame. Whatever your motivation, by being here you are contributing to the success of my experiment. Thank you.

I've reposted all of this because some of the best stuff I find disappears without notice. Very likely this site (mine, all of them) will disappear without much notice or fanfare too. If someone does continue to pay the web host, it doesn't last forever. I'm glad for the Wayback Machine and Internet Archives. Now and then I give them a few dollars I can spare, thinking of the future and hoping I won't entirely disappear from it. I'm silly that way. I think its a sign of age.

I'm saving this post (I had posted it to social media earlier and then found the link was 404 today). I'm not running WordPress now but I'd like to crosspost my Bluesky posts into my blog, Blogger in particular. It would be handy rather than cut and pasting over and over. So, one day I will try this code. I hope it works, when I try it. Meanwhile, it could be a great help to someone else right now.

How to Embed Your Bluesky Feed In Your WordPress Site Without Plugins or Paying Posted on February 17, 2025 by ΞVΞ

I’ve always liked embedding my main social media feed to my WordPress site, so I had Twitter easily embedded to the sidebar on it. However, with the downfall of Twitter, I’ve moved to Bluesky and unfortunately, I found no documentation on how to do this except for a couple plugins, of which one of them required a paid subscription since Bluesky is so new. My personal preference has always been to have as little plugins as possible on my WordPress blog to avoid any potential conflicts with other plugins or themes, so I set out for a way to do this and found none.

I don’t remember how I found a way because it was some time last year, but I did through fiddling with the Bluesky code, so I hope you find this useful.

Go to your WordPress Admin page > Appearance > Widgets and create a new Custom HTML block in your preferred location Paste this code into the block changing “BLUESKY-HANDLE” to your Bluesky @username without the “@”. Below that, you can change the limit for number of Bluesky posts to show. The default is 5, but you can make it as many or less as you want. The quotes on either side of the username and limit are required. In WordPress, click “Update” on the top right corner and that’s it!

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bsky-embed@0.0.5/dist/bsky-embed.es.js" async></script>
<bsky-embed  
  username="BLUESKY-HANDLE"  
  limit="5"  
>  
</bsky-embed>

Hope this helps!