I paid for a Business plan over a year ago. I decided to try it out because the folks at WordPress offered a ‘sale’ price and then allowed me to subtract the pro-rated money left on the Personal plan I was on at the time. The price at that time came out to $200 US, which for me was still pretty steep. The regular Business plan price is $300/year.

So I played with it for a year to see if inspiration and good luck would strike and I could turn the blog into a storefront for a possible business. Obviously that didn’t happen, and so I started to look around to move back to my original Personal plan. Except I couldn’t.

I eventually found that I had to wait until the Business plan expired, then pick the Personal plan. Except…

My Business plan has expired. It expired back on 28 June. I’ve been waiting to go into the Plans section and pick Personal again and move on. Except the only options available from WordPress so far is to renew my Business plan for another $300 for another year. Which I do not want to do. I want the much less expensive personal plan.

I don’t want to spend that much money on the Business plan, I don’t need to spend that much money. All I want is to pay just enough for no ads on my website and to have some control over its look and feel. Instead, I’m in a state of limbo. I can’t seem to reach out to anyone at WordPress, and I can’t pick and pay for the plan that works best for me. And I feel uncomfortable being on a plan I haven’t paid for.

I am beginning to wonder who is in charge at WordPress, and if they’re paying attention. I’ll grant you that my little blog is so tiny that it probably doesn’t register. At all. But there it is. I’m taking up storage (very small storage mind you) and bandwidth (again, very small bandwidth). I should be paying for what I do use. I’m just afraid that somebody is going to wake up one day and get all hot and bothered and come after me.

But in the mean time, I guess I’ll keep plugging away and posting whatever comes to my mind.

An awful lot of folks like to use WordPress. And for the most part so do I. But there are times when I question the overall quality of the site and its products, especially the mobile products. And what makes it worse is when WordPress keeps pushing their mobile products over their web-based products.

What started this morning’s rant was my attempt to clean up two misspelled words in the last post; ‘forth’ and ‘angle’. I’d meant to type ‘fourth’ and ‘angel’. So I opened up the post in the iPhone WordPress app and quickly fixed those two words, then saved the edit. When I went back to view it later on a regular desktop browser, the post was broken.

• The image at the top, which was centered, was offset to the left. I had to go back into the desktop web-based editor and recenter the image.
• The caption underneath was no longer a caption. The caption tags had been removed. I had to go back onto the desktop web-based editor and add those tags back in again.

Two minor problems, right? Perhaps if these kinds of problems were few and very far between, but they’re not. I have learned the hard and bitter way to never use the WordPress app (both iOS and Android) to neither edit existing posts nor create them. I’ve even tried to use Ulysses as my primary editor and then export to WordPress, but that’s been something of a shambling mess as well. Ulysses is fine for general writing, but as a front end for WordPress, it’s even worse than WordPress’ own apps.

If I want to write on my blog the only really consistent and powerful tool is the editor under wp-admin/post-new.php. This in spite of the little popups that keep telling me about the more modern and wonderful editor on the web side. No. The app editors and the modern web editor all suck dead hamsters through a garden hose. I almost wish (almost!) I had access to the app source so I could fork it and then fix all the annoyances and outright bugs, at least on the iOS side. I really would like a consistent experience between the classic web page editor and iOS. With iPadOS getting ready to drop this fall, it would be even nicer if I could migrate over to one of my iPad Pros (I have the 9.7 inch 2017 and the 12.9 inch 2017) using the native WordPress app. But until a miracle occurs and WordPress cleans up its iOS apps, I’ll continue to use the classic web editor. And here’s a clue for the WordPress developers: I’m beta testing iPadOS on the 9.7″, and the Safari editor is complete enough that I can use the classic web-based editor on my iPad in place of the app. I don’t really need the app. And neither does anyone else for that matter. Think about that…