Personal / Professional

Wow, what a week! I’m so excited to have finally debuted my first major content since starting my site with my Pokémon Crystal review. It took me roughly ten days to make it, with WordPress troubleshooting taking up a considerable length of that time.

This review/article/retrospective/journal combo is the closest I’ve gotten to achieving what I wanted when I originally began media analysis. It’s relatively comprehensive, full of depth, uses media to provide examples and engage readers, and it never compromises my personal experience or personality. That’s not to say I think it’s perfect or I’m never going to top it, simply that it currently serves as the best example for the style I’ve always desired.

As an aside, at the time of writing I’m still experiencing issues formatting images on that article. Something about captioning images in a row breaks the blocks’ orientation, and I can’t figure out a solution. I made some quick edits so that the pictures and captions are at least legible, but they’re not aesthetically pleasing. All I want is for the images to be aligned to the center with even space between them, and the captions being able to fill the width of whitespace left from the center alignment so that they’re not extending too far down the page. For some reason, this is not the default behavior of captions. I’ll figure out a fix eventually, but please bear with me for now.

On that note, I’m always open to feedback. I’m not interested in cutting content, but if anyone perceives any redundancy, errors, disorganization — anything, really — I hope you will speak your mind. I consider everything I write to be a living document, and as such they’re always open to improvements and expansion. Subscribing to this very blog is the best way to ensure you’re made aware of significant alterations and updates.

So, where do we go from here? When I completed Crystal I went on to Pokémon SoulSilver. Then I beat it. And Pokémon Black 2. And Alpha Sapphire. And now I’m playing Ultra Moon. You might see the issue. I’m pretty behind, and as that gap widens I run the risk of my analyses weakening due to my waning memory and impressions.

I may have to force myself to throw caution to the wind a little if I want to document all of my experiences before they’re gone from my memory. In other words, not all reviews will be the same scope of Crystal. Some will be smaller, and some may even exceed it. But I need to put stuff out more regularly.

I say this, but I’m pretty sure I began the Crystal review thinking I would just cover the changes from Gold and Silver in almost a list-like fashion. Once I began contextualizing them with my own anecdotes and personal history however, all bets were off on it being a concise article. It’s entirely likely I can’t stop myself from doing that with the others. I’m going to sit down, start writing, then see where it ends. I’ll be counting on all of you, my audience, to tell me when my reviews are satisfying you or when they might need more time spent on them.

We’ll see how it goes. I hope this Crystal review shows people why some of my recently shelved reviews such as Aliens: Infestation and Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya haven’t materialized. I spend a ton of time on these and hold them to high standards. If motivation ever decreases, it can destroy the quality of the final product. In those cases, I put those works on hiatus for when I’m more inspired to polish them. For Crystal, my enthusiasm remained high throughout, and I felt comfortable publishing the article.

This isn’t me saying those articles will never come out, mind. The drafts are still saved. There’s a lot of work there, and eventually I want my thoughts on damn near everything on this site, so they can’t escape. Just please understand that I’m always working on something even if it takes a while to release it.

Public

This site has received so many alterations recently that I’ve lost track of which ones I’ve yet to mention. The front page has had the header and footer altered, and a banner featuring my latest publications has been added. There’s a rudimentary blog post archive that can now be accessed from the front page. I’ve created a new template for my articles, which can be seen on more recent creations. I’d like to apply this format to all previous articles, but to my knowledge WordPress has no way to do this because their “templates” feature doesn’t actually allow for templates. I don’t fucking know.

I’ve ended up having to make empty blocks in the style and formatting I want, then saving them as a “pattern”. I create a new page, then I paste that pattern into it. From there, I begin filling in the missing information. This would be a fine system were it not for the fact that if I want to make any alteration to the pattern, it applies to all pages using the pattern.

For instance, if I type “Super Mario World” in the pattern’s “Title:” section, it adds “Super Mario World” to all instances of that pattern and saves the change to my template pattern. I can circumvent this by unlinking the pasted blocks to the pattern, which is what I’ve been doing, but now I’m unable to alter the pattern when I actually want to. If I decide I want a block to have a different font or color, I have to go through and edit every individual page. I can’t find any solution to his, and support avenues have been unhelpful as well.

Regardless, I’ve made big strides with learning WordPress in the past two weeks. I keep praying for a “eureka” moment where the structure of the platform and its UI suddenly become intuitively clear to me. If you try and use Google for help, you’re exclusively given results not only irrelevant to your issue, but for more experienced users. That is, people asking for help on their code. WordPress is marketed as being something accessible to everyone, yet a base of neophytes doesn’t seem to exist which implies a barrier of entry. If I try to get more direct help from the forums, my threads are ignored. I feel like a fucking peasant or something.

So there’s that feeling of alienation, for one. And we may realize that Google has intentionally tanked its search algorithm’s efficacy in the name of shareholder meeting babble. But it’s still hard to ignore that basic reaction of “am I just stupid? I’m the only one who needs help with this, so I must be.” As with anything, some people will say that I am and that everything came naturally to them. That’s fine. But I’m from a generation that grew up with computers, and I’ve used them for my entire life. This isn’t me trying to throw a football — WordPress is a business. They’re a business that, in my experience, are not good at what they claim to be. If it weren’t for sunken cost fallacy, I would be more willing to explore other platform options. But again, I was already directed here to begin with for its ease of use. Am I to believe other hosts are even worse?

A vindicating moment came as I was putting the finishing touches on my Pokémon Crystal review. I had a use for a vertical separator. I’d used horizontal ones many times in the past to more clearly distinguish blocks of text. Obviously, I would just add a separator and go to the options to select a vertical one.

You can’t.

Hundreds of default blocks, and I can’t make a fucking solid black vertical line with a single click. Why? Do WordPress designers just hate verticality? In their homes, do they lay every video game console on its side? Do they prefer to lay on their side and roll instead of walking? Orientation prejudice somehow feels like a more reasonable explanation than to think a platform that’s been around for this long hasn’t implemented something so basic that it’s outdone by MSPaint in the 90s. It’s like walking into a sandwich store and learning that they don’t stock bread.

From my searching, though I know searches are unreliable these days, it seemed the common suggestion for this fix was to install one of many plug-ins that allow for unofficial WordPress blocks. Having to go to an outside source to make a literal line is one thing, but it also requires you be on the WordPress Business Plan subscription. Without that, you can’t install plug-ins at all. That subscription’s cost? $40 a month. I’d have to pay $40 a month to be able to use vertical lines. Is this a scam? Am I being scammed?

And again, am I stupid? Insane? Even if I get a reply to this post along the lines of, “hey dumbass, you missed something really obvious”, I would welcome it. At least then I would have an answer to the question of “why can’t I just make a vertical line?” Unless I discover I’m horribly mistaken, I no longer believe my difficulties with WordPress are my fault. I mean, not entirely anyway.

It might be worth mentioning, if a little late, that I more or less have a degree in UI testing. I’ve conducted usability tests and have written protocol for them. I won’t lie and say that I have a ton of experience yet, but these kinds of struggles really ought to be ironed out with regular usability tests.

Despite all of this, I’m still in a better spot than I was earlier this month. I have more knowledge, and my site has more and higher quality content. I’m a bit exhausted, but it still pales in comparison to the enthusiasm I have for taking this site to the next level. I hope you all follow along with me.