On Jun 16, 2022, at 5:01 AM, WordPress.com <donotreply@wordpress.com> wrote:

Donotreply addresses are exactly why I’m one finger tapping this rant 🙂

Hi there,

You know, I’m up, oddly, very early this morning and haven’t eaten breakfast yet.

I’m writing you today because I noticed that you have an unclaimed credit on your account — a credit that will allow you to secure a custom site address of your choice completely free of charge for the first year.

Been there done that

You see, your site address (we call it a “domain name”) is the first thing visitors notice about your brand. And right now, your website address is dougsamu.wordpress.com. That’s perfectly fine if you’re building this site for fun.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. 🙂

But if you’re building something more than a hobby site, I encourage you to claim a site address that doesn’t include “.wordpress.com”. Here are a few options we would suggest for your site:

With one of these addresses, you can make a more unique, lasting impression on your visitors and possibly rank higher in search results.

And the best thing is, because you already have a WordPress.com plan, you can claim a new site address right now, entirely free of charge for one year.

P.S. When you select a new site address for free, we’ll automatically redirect traffic from your old wordpress.com domain to your new one, so you won’t lose a single follower.

You know what? I already have dougsamu.ca which has been tediously arranged to redirect to the wordpress site. Do you know how puzzling it is to find the page where I can do this myself? If I were an engineer or code-kid I could parse the puzzling links and inconsistent naming conventions in the maze like menu system. But no. I spend a day or two digging through pages and panels to find that top level admin page link buried under some obscure nearly invisible icon some distance from the related text to scrape my brain against an internet wide set of variables – searching various scattered help pages and sites to find out that This means That – variously named but which mean the same thing then give up and contact support through those miserable tiny chat boxes off in my peripheral vision that I need my 3 times readers to see.

Don’t get me wrong. Help is unfailingly cheerful and efficient. And otherwise the user interface of WordPress is pretty straightforward. I do understand what you want to be protecting the user from themselves in this case. Why should it take me three days, or your extremely well paid help staff to do something as simple as changing the content of one variable.

Sent from my iPhone

Download our free mobile app today.

I once built a handy little Shortcut which put up a blog post directly from any of my mobile devices

I don’t know. Somebody’s code changed. Somebody’s operating system changed. Somebody decided to re-write so the thing is no longer working. I found the mobile app not good for much more than putting up a blog post. Anything admin or design wise it just redirects to the website page anyway which is a cluster of promotional panels and mystery links buried under oddly named menu items. So it really isn’t much use. I understand new functionalities are being built in. But not the ones I need.

But the thing that I want to do isn’t there so why bother recommending this free app to me?

Thanks for listening. Hangry off. 🙂