In your life there are some irritating characters. People who irritate you to no end. Maybe its their behavior, body language, or way they speak or dress. They just infuriate you and you cannot tolerate their presence. In case you cannot ask them to effoff, you just get the interaction with them over as soon as possible. Yet they persist.
Similarly, there are software applications which fit in this role of irritating characters. They bug you to do things which it (meaning the software designers) think is the “correct” way. One such crappy piece of software is the new “block editor” of wordpress. It is an application which irritates and interferes in the very process of writing a blog. Maybe there are people who like it, (to each their own). But I personally think the block editor is a cook book of how not to design software. Or Maybe I am too old to make new chic editors work well for me.
Every time it bugs you. Like a cheap salesman trying to sell his shitty wares to you. I am not sure why I can’t use the “classic editor” if I am more comfortable with it. Why is wordpress hell bent shoving this un-user friendly piece of software down to everyone’s posts? The block editor may have its advantages, but not for me. I prefer simple editor which allows me to focus on the writing instead of a menu popping every now and then which I have to click to dismiss. If I want a block I will call it, I don’t want the editor to push a block between me and my post. Block editor is defective by design in a way.
And there is no way you can turn it off unless you pay. WordPress perhaps knows this, that their editor is trash. Hence only with a hefty upgrade of “business” plan you can get it off your back by installing a “plugin” for classic editor, which should be there by default in the first place. This is akin to ransomware. You pay us or you continue to have shitty, sub-optimal experience with irritating pop-ups. Mind you I am not talking about completely free wordpress installation, it doesn’t even come with “personal” or “premium” plans so even with paid service they don’t want you to have any control over what editor you use.
So my workflow is now, to create a new post in “block editor”, then save a draft, return to the “All posts” and then continue with classic editor. Even then it continuously bugs you if I want to edit in the block editor, if I wanted to I would have, Now since I don’t want, can you please effoff and store this simple request of using classic editor next time?
No it won’t. Aren’t software designers at wordpress capable of understanding this simple request? Or they are doing it willingly to force people to move to their way however irritating and uncomfortable they are?
If wordpress even removes this support for classic editor, I will surely leave this platform and take my blog somewhere else. I was contemplating to leave it this year, but my lethargy prevented me from doing it. But then, lethargy has its limits and and so has patience in dealing with (purposefully) badly designed software applications and processes.
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Freedom of Expression in India
This is a meta blog, as it is a blog about this blog.
About 10 years back the GoI decided that there were a lot of dissident voices from the North-East on Yahoo! Groups which were harmful to the health of the nation. The result was that there was a blanket ban on Yahoo! groups. Then people who were using Yahoo! Groups other than what GoI thought was harmful, suffered too. It was a classic case of complete misunderstanding about the nature of how the internet works. Of course then as now people had means to go over the blockade. That was 10 years back, net penetration was not that much, so we could forgive the bureaucracy over such things. Claiming disease called ignorance.
10 years have passed, one would have expected that the babus and their political masters would have learned (something) about how this new technology works and how it is fundamentally different than other mass media. If not the old babus, the somewhat younger generation which replaced them. (Oh, but I heard babus never retire they are kept on the job as part of this or that committee.) In a sense of deja vu, this time also the trouble was in the North-East. After the violence there, and its strange aftermath in Bombay (Middle-West) thousands of kilometers away and also in Bangalore (Down-South). Then began the blame games and it was discovered that the social networking sites were the culprit. So what is the quick fix solution? Ban all of them.
ना रहेगा बास ना बजेगी बांसुरी .
So this blog and my other blogs were not accessible through my humble Photon+ conncetion. It just refused to open these sites. I thought it was some problem with my connection. Only today I came to know the grim reality, that they had actually blocked WordPress, completely! Though other ISPs as of now have not, but it may not be long before they do that. This is akin to banning all printing presses as someone prints something objectionable to someone. And in a democracy, someone will get offended by whatever you say. But it might be just that the babus are also executing their freedom of speech, by giving orders to ISPs for blocking other people’s Freedom of Speech. Here we are in paradoxical situation.
Can Freedom of Speech of one person supersede the Freedom of Speech of other? But the constitution says that all people are equal, then how is this possible?
Orwell comes to our rescue then when says:
All are equal and some are more equal than others.
This cuts the knot for us, and we can perfectly make sense of the things that are happening around us.
Maybe someone needs to put up a PIL in SC against such blanket bans in the future, to uphold the Right to Free Speech! And I sincerely hope that person who makes such a PIL is more equal than others.
And may be not all of you will be able to read this, as wordpress is blocked…