A while back I vainly tried to heed the warnings in Site Health, some vague mumbling on about PHP 7.3 and below being whatever. Yeah, okay, so off to the hosting provider.

Punch the PHP to 7.4, which turns out to be 7.4.10. While this satisfied Site Health, it broke JetPack. So I chatted up the hosting providers technical support, some vague mumbles about something called ctype, and it looked like it worked. But it didn’t. Still broken. But this is a dead blog that nobody reads, so who cares?

So, on Mastodon I found a developer who mentioned something about WordPress 6.2. So I wondered if there were other updates to be had. Gutenberg got updated, and editing in WordPress is as unpleasant as usual. So that’s at least comforting. It also turns out that JetPack also updated. There was a brief flash of the old bug, where JetPack refuses to authenticate to WordPress.com, but a click on the Authenticate button seemed to work this time.

The editor, Gutenberg, has a curious anti-writer quality about it. It’s sluggish, I can type way faster than the computer can register the keypresses. So I can write out text, quickly typing away, and then go to the bathroom while Gutenberg struggles with putting characters on a screen.

It’s not really a huge surprise that this blog is dead. Writing is unpleasant. Ah well, PHP 7.4.10 appears to be working at this point, so this sad experience can end. Gah, WordPress. It was free, and you get what you pay for.