As any of my loyal followers will know, I’m not good with technology. When it’s going ok, I’m easy to live with, when it mucks up, I’m like a bear with a sore head.

For months now I’ve been ‘languishing’, I’ve had little motivation to blog, as have a few other bloggers I’m sure since this pandemic changed our world. The rare times when motivation did prompt me to attempt a blog post I ended up almost tearing my hair out in frustration as my WordPress site thwarted me at every attempt. I just couldn’t return to any drafts, only the title was saving, but no content. I felt defeated. My state of ‘languish’ would turn to anger, and then I would feel myself starting to spiral into feelings of hopelessness. I knew if I continued on I’d risk becoming truly depressed. Knowing I’m technologically inadequate, I’d think to myself, ‘what right have you to be part of this blogging world when you don’t know the first thing about the technology that runs it’. I was feeling like a fraud.

This week I felt a rare touch of motivation. I tried again. The same thing happened. I went from frustration to anger to despair many times through an afternoon of trying to get something that would save, anything at all that I could publish. Eventually I did manage to get something to save. I don’t know how. I didn’t proof read, or try to fix anything. It wasn’t formatted as I would have liked, but the words and pictures had stayed on screen. I published.

I tried again a day later. No such luck. Again nothing would save. I contacted the ‘happiness gurus’ from WordPress. My so called ‘happiness guru’ had me going down the path of browser problems. This story could turn into a book if I related all the details of our typed conversation, so I won’t detail the conversation or the links he forwarded to me. I was spiralling down, down, down as I attempted make any sense of what I was being told to do. My head was full of white noise.

Finally someone at the other end (I’ve been through a few ‘happiness gurus’ in the past few days) suggested we revert to email and I send some screen shots. Turns out this person actually deserves the title of ‘guru’, perhaps even ‘happiness guru’. I sent several screen shots, and the person receiving them actually looked at them. Turns out it was nothing at all to do with my browser. The screenshots gave her something to work with. A picture definitely paints a thousand words.

This is what was found:

M.H (Automattic) May 6, 2021, 16:07 UTC Hi Chris,Thank you for the screenshots. I see that you are starting in the WP Admin dashboard of your site: https://hassanipremiumsitetest.wordpress.com/wp-admin/ and not in the default dashboard: https://wordpress.com/home/lifeofrileyow.com. It’s ok to continue using the WP Admin dashboard as long as it’s available, but some features may not work as expected as they get replaced by more modern alternatives.The “Draft” dashboard widget that you are using creates content as if it was created with the Classic Editor (now deprecated). And you are viewing the content of the draft usingthe default Block Editor.  But, as you figured out, these blocks can be fixed by converting them to “Classic Blocks”. From there you can convert them to regular blocks by clicking “Convert to blocks”. As demonstrated below:

A bit more detail was added, but then the gem came, the lightbulb piece of advice!

🔍 Please note that another quick way to start creating content is to click the “Write” button in the top right corner of your WordPress.com dashboard:

And presto! It works.

I have saved this post many times in draft form, and returned to it. I can’t tell you how good it feels to actually see content saved instead of just the title. If elation is the opposite of despair, then my mind set is definitely the opposite of what has been of late when attempting a blog post. Any formatting errors or spelling, or grammatical errors are definitely attributable to the writer this time. And that is most definitely my pleasure!