Dearest Readers,
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the images I carefully select and attach to my posts to provide what is (in my own mind) a “great page experience” (together with the indefinite article) for those of you who are kind enough to read them, weren’t appearing properly, if at all.
Life being what it is, I couldn’t engage usefully with WordPress at the time. But this morning, I did.
It appears that the culprit is a plugin called “AMP,” one I didn’t request or download, but which was foisted upon me by the site itself. Somehow, the assigned (not by me) “AMP” setting of “Reader,” was buggering up the appearance of my posts. Once I changed the setting to “Standard,” my posts appeared more normally. At least, according to my sources, they seem to be doing so.” (You’ll be able to tell if you go to–say–the post An Open Letter Four Years On, and you see at the top right a gentleman (!) wearing an orange jacket. If he’s not there, then either he’s not a gentleman, or the damn thing still isn’t working.
Here’s the offensive AMP settings page, after I changed the “template mode” to “standard”:
I’m still having problems in that post “Likes” are not displaying properly on Edge, Safari, Firefox, or Opera. Or on iPads and iPhones. And disabling the damn AMP doesn’t fix the problem. In fact, when I do, images don’t display in my posts, and neither do likes.
Hard to see how the “Great Page Experience” promised by the AMP frauds actually is one. As I said, just a short while ago to the very nice and trying-to-help WordPress support person:
If I could DISABLE it and get back to what might be a SLOWER loading mobile site that actually LOADED MY POSTS THE WAY I WANTED THEM TO, that would be great. Loading my posts faster by DISABLING THE IMAGES I”VE TAKEN TIME TO INSERT really isn’t a benefit, you know?
That support person said that it’s complicated, that AMP–although it’s directed at the “mobile site experience” sometimes screws with the desktop experience also– and that my feedback would be escalated. We’ll see.
To be clear, WordPress, here’s what I’d like: I’d like my posts to appear on the web with the images I’ve included in them. I’d like third-party “Likes” on my posts to display and aggregate. And I’d like other third parties to be able to “Like” my posts without the option either being invisible, or stuck perpetually at a “Loading….” status.
All these things used to work just fine. You effed it up, I’d like YOU to fix it for me. Thank you very much, WordPress.
Here follow several images that are not necessarily related to the content of this post, and which are presented just to see if they show up:
The. End.
