Wordpress Is Crap

It can't be just me. I was hearing it from everyone - Wordpress is the way to go, they said. Wordpress was freedom. Once I'd mastered a few basic tenets I'd be free. No longer chained to a lumpy computer slugging it out with a dodgy copy of Dreamweaver, Wordpress would probably fix the house up for us and I'd be just like other people - suave, successful, handsome even. With Wordpress on board I'd soon be strutting about on a deck built on to the back of the house, drinking coffee with no shirt on, and saying yah, yahyah yak into a mobile phone at eight thirty in the morning having completed my yoga exercises and treated the wife to a couple of hours of tantric sex.

But it wasn't like that at all. It was a great move getting rid of the lumpy computer / dodgy Dreamweaver configuration. I had a temporary site hosted by Weebly.com, a company that appear to specialise in cheap looking off-the-peg sites for downmarket religious organisations. That was right up my street, albeit a little shabby looking. Weebly's been lucky for us, we sold our house in France via a Weebly site.

It's still there - houseinthehautevienne.weebly.com Go and have a look if you like. No one's going to mind. Stroll from room to room courtesy of the oh so easily installed slide show of my oh so easily uploaded photos. It was fun and it worked, and we couldn't bring ourselves to take it down once the place was sold (which took a mere two months). We don't care if you see inside or see the ridiculously low price for which we sold the place. We're proud of it and we love that site. Go on, treat yourself... www.houseinthehautevienne.weebly.com

Weebly worked for me so I made a whacky Wreckless Eric site with it. It was easy - I uploaded photos, tour dates, a twitter widget, and even sound files so that you could listen to stuff. The studio page might have looked tacky because it was after all a Weebly template designed more for announcing the Second Coming than Eric & Amy tour dates in Brighton, Bristol and Hull, but every time I opened the page our version of In My Room from Two Way Family favourites started playing and I felt proud and happy to be alive. Let's re-live the moment...



That wasn't at all difficult. I love Blogger!  I tried for days to embed a track in Wordpress and by the time I'd cracked it the thrill was gone and I felt depressed and vaguely suicidal. Amy told me last night that she quite regrets transferring her blog to Wordpress. By way of comfort and consolation I told her she was lucky she doesn't have an entire Wordpress site to contend with.

But as I was saying... other artists were going to want to record here, the bookings would roll in, and in between times I 'd build a deck on the back of the house where I could strut about unshirted going yah yah yak into a cellphone, a picture of success.

But it wasn't to be. Wordpress was obviously where it was at. I was convinced I'd be a failure without Wordpress, so I tried to download, install and activate Wordpress on my lumpy old laptop with its large hard drive, mega memory and massive processor. I failed quite miserably and enlisted the help of a man in Norfolk who runs a server and hosts sites for a web designer friend of ours. He got the Wordprss account up and running and I pretty soon mastered the basics and built a site that looks quite nice given the fascistically narrow parameters that Wordpress offers (to all except the furtively wanking geeks that spend their time pissing about with code in between sessions with bigtits.com and a box of Kleenex) - every page is the same but you don't have to have the sidebar widget ghetto, you can have a useless blank space on some of the pages instead.

It's a joyless activity, buggering about with Wordpress. I've always loved having a website. I never minded that due to my inabilities and lack of kowledge it looked shabby and homemade. Shabby and homemade were my style and I celebrated. I made computer drawings using the Windows XP paint programme and the mouse as a pencil. At times the entire site was constructed using the paint programme. I had fun, I said what I thought, put my foot in it sometimes, I offended some people and made a lot of others laugh.  Some people had the nerve to complain, as if I was obliged to provide a public service - your site's really difficult to navigate, they'd say, and I'd direct them to a hospital trust site or a Florida vacation site and everyone would be happy. If a little puzzled.

The Golden Age Of The Internet. Those days are long gone. It's all widgets and apps and stuff I don't undertand - not because I'm old and stupid. I might be getting on in years but I'm neither of those things and I'm pretty sure that I don't want to have my life run by a bunch of yah yah yak html know it all wannabees who spend their crappy lives fuck-arseing about with code and contributing to the worldwide abomination that is Wordpress. Wordpress is a fucking mess and unless someone can please explain it to me I intend to get beyond and without my Wordpress site as soon as I possibly can. I can't be the only one.

As an experiment I've put out tour dates up on here. You just click on "Tour Dates" up there at the top of the page.