Where have my WordPress posts gone?

After many events in my life since the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, I finally decided to return to my blog and start writing again. Since 2010, perhaps, I have considered WordPress and blogging to be synonymous. Or at least, that’s what I used to think—until I decided to return two days before writing this article, only to be shocked by what can only be described as a disaster that has befallen WordPress, both as software and as a community.

My first shock was the catastrophe known as the Gutenberg editor. I don’t even know where to begin when listing its flaws and shortcomings—whether from the perspective of a blogger or a developer. It is nothing but a chaotic, absurd, and clumsy mess.

This led me to revisit some of the old blogs I used to follow in the first two decades of this millennium, only to find that most individual bloggers had abandoned their blogs. And who could blame them? I honestly don’t understand how WordPress could betray its community like this in its pursuit of becoming a website builder. We, web and software developers, barely acknowledged it as a content management system alongside its primary function as a blogging and writing platform.

I seriously considered recreating my blog, which was on wordpress.com, using an older version of WordPress on a private server. And when I say “older,” I mean before all this nonsense began—which, of course, is an impractical idea. The simplest reason being all the security vulnerabilities that must have been patched over the years. Even if I managed to get back the WordPress I once loved, that wouldn’t mean it would be secure. It would be like a once-beloved forest where you spent joyful times with friends, only for darkness to take over, consuming it with an insatiable hunger, leaving behind only the illusion of what it once was, no longer aligned with reality.

After exploring my options, I found that the most reasonable and straightforward solution—literally the simplest, despite its complexity—was to use my knowledge as a web and software developer to create my blog from scratch without relying on pre-built software. And so, by the grace of God, I finally built this blog.

Before making this decision, while I was still considering my available options, I revisited some of my old articles on wordpress.com—my former blog. Beyond the fact that all the static pages, such as the “About Me” page or the “About This Blog” page, contained outdated information from eight or ten years ago, some articles felt like fragments of a child’s, a teenager’s, or a young adult’s past life. They no longer represented my views, beliefs, or even convictions. Though I’m not at all ashamed of most of them, as they were natural stages of growth, I felt that most had no reason to remain. Even the ones I considered keeping had such poor and primitive English that they needed rewriting and restructuring before being republished. Ironically, I now work as a private English tutor as part of my various pursuits! Praise be to God—every blessing is from Him, and we do not deny it.

So, after everything, here I am once again—stubborn in my refusal to be swept away by the storms that have driven individual writers and bloggers into obscurity. I resist the dominance of the modern web that has taken hold in this decade, perhaps even since the mid-2010s—dominance that I see as nothing more than an empty attempt to silence voices and diminish the presence of carefully crafted opinions in favor of drowning the web in the shallow distractions of TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. Even the truncated, or rather, trivialized thoughts on Twitter and LinkedIn contribute to this erosion.

We were here in this digital world before any of these names existed. And we remain. And indeed, we shall prevail.