WordPress is a lot more Popular

I’ve been doing some Googling on various WordPress and other Internet trends. I really should have done more with my blog and website, but I had a lot of issues to deal with in the last few years. Now things are stable in some ways, but since I’m unemployed not stable enough. I’ve spent the last five days doing a crash course on WordPress, PHP, and plugins. I still have a bug or two, but my custom WordPress theme is cleaner and leaner than ever. My sidebar is where I need to do some pruning and revising.

I keep trying plugins but a lot of them are disappointing. Bird Feeder which is part of Mint, I upgraded today has once again broken my blog’s feeds or at least WordPress plugins for Bird Feeder that are supposed to be easy to use have. I don’t even really need Mint. Google Analytics is free and so is whatever comes with my web hosting package. Zeldman recommended it back when I was still a subscriber to his blog. Now I mainly read and subscribe to hobby sites or sites specifically relating to my work at BOB and before that KOTRA.

In 2010 I was using NewsFire to manage my feeds now as Opera went all weird on my news feeds and still hasn’t recovered. Both Opera and Firefox require me to force quit them and/or restart too often. A lot of software disappoints me. I know it is possible to develop good, robust software that is up-dateable, documented, and tested, but too much stuff is hacked together in a hurry and it really bothers me, not enough to become a software developer again, at least not right away, but some of the jobs I’ve applied to have me going back closer to my software developer roots, I might even do some volunteer web design work.

I added a favicon to my site, did it the old fashioned way, mass search and replace, after reading about a WordPress plugin that does it. I even briefly thought again about putting my entire website into WordPress, but that just seems like too much work, especially if I try to maintain all the old URLs.

While doing all this surfing about WordPress I found the WPTopics site created by Darren Hoyt. It seems to have some sort of the text encoding issue at least in Opera on the Mac, which admittedly is used by very, very, very, very few people, but maybe the bug is wider spread. I took a screen shot which I’ll throw up here. I never think to just throw stuff up on Flickr or elsewhere and send a link, I always want to email the screen shot. Oh well Darren and crew should be able to fix whatever is wrong. They don’t even have to deal with 漢字 just English text so it is odd that a Latin encoding or UTF 8 would fail like this.

WordPress Popularity 15 Years Later

A lot has happened since I wrote this blog post. I’ve upgraded to WordPress 5. I’ve lived in China again. I switched to a new News Reader, and once again I’m looking at being unemployed but I’m more determined than ever to make it brief unlike previously. This time I may just take another teaching job and try to enjoy life for a while, but first I will go back to Canada and get my knee looked at because I’ve done too much damage to it over the years. Maybe all my hard work will increase the popularity of this WordPress blog.

The efforts I expended in 2019 did not make this blog more popular, the efforts I expended in 2024 did not make this blog more popular, now in 2025 I finally moved web hosts and that also is unlikely to make this blog more popular. However WordPress remains popular and this blog has been running on WordPress for 20 years, something I’ve been building up to blogging about, so if you have thoughts on WordPress popularity after twenty years you can leave a comment below.

This entry was originaly posted on September 11th, 2010, it was last edited on August 24th, 2025 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Blogging, WordPress, World Wide Web.