April 1, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
Some of you may have noticed that the address of this blog has changed; it's now my own domain instead of a WordPress subdomain. I've owned the domain for a while, but it used to point toward my escort site (whose address is subtly different), and now it points here. It's probably a move I should've made six or seven years ago, but some of you may have also noticed that I'm pathologically change-averse and rarely do anything like that unless I'm forced to. Well, I was finally forced to. Like most internet companies, WordPress employs a small army of programmers, and like most US employers it demands they stay busy; the result is a steady trickle of "improvements" that aren't. For several years now, the company has been trying to push its new "block editor"; I took one look and realized it was far less useful than the so-called "classic" editor (take a look at some sample one-star reviews, which outnumber all other reviews of the block editor by a factor of > 2 to 1). But they kept pushing it, and sometime last year changed the site to default to it. The "classic" editor was still available, but harder to get to, so I had to create several workarounds to keep going. Then on the morning of March 17 th, I awoke to discover that the company had removed the "classic" editor entirely; Google helped me discover that it was now only availble as a plugin, and plugins only work on upgraded sites, so here we are. The change introduced some back-end problems (they only affected my view of the site, not readers') which were solved with the help of WordPress tech support, and one gremlin seemed to have escaped into my android phone via Chrome and had to be exterminated separately. But as of this writing, things seem fully functional again.
Other than the new, shorter address, another change is coming: after all these years, I'm going to start taking advertising. Since I'm now semi-retired and I don't have nearly as much subscription income as I'd like, I definitely need to monetize the tremendous amount of work I've put into this site for over a decade and continue to put in on a daily basis. This doesn't mean I'm throwing all of my standards out the window; I don't like blinking, flashing, jumping, moving, distracting or otherwise annoying ads on other sites and I'm not going to allow them on mine if I can help it (that goes double for popups). But since I'm not at all familiar with how the sytem works, it's possible that such ads may get in without my permission via whatever delivery system I use, so it's important y'all let me know if something like that appears (I may add a "report annoying ad" button or the like). And if anyone wants to buy an ad from me, obviously we can talk. The change will probably be slow as I feel things out and decide exactly what works for me, but I thought it only fair to let y'all know that it's on the way.
