Editor’s note: This is a companion post to But I Still Love Technology-The Evens & But I Still Love Technology-The Other Odds, and, with their powers combined, form a complete version of The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story. If you haven’t read The Evens yet, you can do so here. The Other Odds will be forthcoming in a few short days.
Editor’s additional note: This countdown list is admittedly a bit meta–i.e. a blog post about adventures in blogging. As such, it may be of particular interest to those who are starting up a blog themselves. For the rest of the world, I hope that I’m not getting into the weeds so much that you can’t appreciate the stupidity/frustration/absurdity of these situations. Enjoy! (I’m hoping you do, at least.)
To reiterate what I’m up to:
In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.
And that–spoiler alert–is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.
But I Still Love Technology-The Evens (2020)
Without further ado, I present to you:
The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.
#5: That time I accidentally warped the fabric of space and time.
Shortly after debuting the Point in late August 2019, I was chatting up one of my friends, “Sonny B.,” whom I was hoping to include in an upcoming post, Shotgun Wedding, set to be published September 15th.
To my delight, she had been binging my content, and after she told me what all she had read, I pointed out that the only post she had missed was Bum Sandwich, which was the next-to-most-recent post of mine.
However, she didn’t know what the hell I was talking about…
Now, I don’t have a screenshot to demonstrate this, but I’ll recreate the issue just for y’all.
Let’s just say you type in thepointofthestory.com directly, and go to our homepage. When things are amiss, instead of getting the latest post (“The Evens” post), you see a very judgmental ----- Clark1Did “D1ck” just get censored?!? I bet it just got censored, didn’t it. ----- this ham-fisted Censorship plugin! instead:
Here, I’ll zoom in so you can actually see it:
As you can see, January 5th, 2020 is clearly “more recent” than December 29 or 31, 2019.
Apparently, I had managed to break the fundamental linearity of time as we experience it…
Part of the reason this was particularly frustrating is that potentially my new posts would never show up on the home page, leading most visitors to believe that I’ve stopped posting–and in turn losing critical new readers! (No one wants to read a stale blog, right?)
Anyways, no matter how much I tried tweaking the publishing date, unpublishing/republishing, etc. I could not get the most recent post to show up.
Well, I spent at least a good two weeks of Googling “WordPress posts out of order” and other similar searches to absolutely no avail. I could not find any evidence at all of anyone else in the rather-large WordPress community (millions+) ever having this problem.
Seriously?!? Not one other person had had this egregious problem?
Over and over, all the posts said the same thing: get your dates straight, and all should be copacetic, as this, and this alone, determines “post order.”
As you can (maybe) see in the screenshot of my Posts dashboard, The Evens have the correct date and everything, yet will still show up in the wrong chronological order…arggghhhh! This Universe doesn’t make any ----- sense any more.
I even bravely forged my way into the underlying code, and the function that was mis-fuck-tioning (translated simply into lay-terms) was simply “get next post” or “get previous post.” There was nowhere where the stupid thing could be breaking especially just for little ol’ me…could there?
One evening, when I was staring blankly at this dashboard in daze of hopelessness and despair, I noticed something tiny yet oh-so-slightly off:
It may not seem like much, but that’s my cursor showing up as a 4-directional arrow instead of your regular old pointer arrow.
Suspecting that this was a clue to this ridiculous madness, I clicked on the trouble-making post, and sure as shit, found that I could drag it and freely re-order the posts in such a manner.
I dragged that little bastard to the top of the list where it should be if it were chronological (i.e. FIRST), reloaded my homepage, and held my breath:
HUZZAH! Problem solved! Insanity averted!
But one mystery remained: why was nothing of the sort ever mentioned when I went in search of an answer on Google?
Well, it was on account of a perfect storm of being too clever for my own good coupled with my naiveté when it came to how WordPress functioned.
Long story short,2Who are we kidding, that ship sailed LONG ago. when I was trying to figure out how to make The Complete First Season binge-able from oldest to newest, I had installed a plugin that gives the blogger a bit more control over the order of posts, Simple Custom Post Order. What I didn’t realize is that most people using WordPress don’t have this god-like power to arbitrarily re-order their posts willy-nilly, i.e. the ability to click ‘n’ drag is not normal behavior.
Thinking that publishing them at the appropriate times would make the posts appear in the appropriate order, I was unaware that–under these new rules that I accidentally set up just for me–I needed to drag the newest post to the top of the list.
In summary, it was something of an unforced error due to having given way too much power someone way under-qualified to handle it responsibly.
Interestingly enough, my calendar-rearranging issues was obfuscated by another confounding screw-up. Later in that same conversation with Sonny B., she kept referring to the post which included her–which I had not published or otherwise shared with her.
I was simultaneously confused and impressed by her clairvoyant abilities to read a future post:
It turns out you can’t always blame the machine for bouts of unwanted technological tomfoolery.
Sometimes, there’s just a dipshit behind the wheel who can’t read a calendar…
Content created on: 4/6 January 2020 (Saturday/Monday)
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