First of all, I don't think it's news to anyone that 2020 has, to be polite, sucked. I lost a good part of my productivity this year (for months!) to COVID-19.
Because it's most illustrative of the kind of thing I've had to recover from, here's one of the challenges I had when COVID was at its worst in late January: rooms changed shape. I don't mean a little bit. I mean what platonic solid they were: cube to dodecahedron, for example. š¤® The other was the wall suddenly sliding down the corridor away from me. While I was walking. š¤®
It's amazingly disconcerting not knowing how far walls, doors, floors are from you. I knew it was an illusion, and I knew I was ill and reported the symptom, but it was not of significant enough concern at that point to go to the ER. (This spatial distortion also happened in COVID-19 hospitalized and ICU patients on occasion, but sometimes they didn't know it was an illusion.)
Thoughts on WordPress
I wanted to move my site off WordPress, and managed to not have as good a backup as I'd hoped. I had a database backup that didn't import correctly, and I'd already canceled the hosting before double checking.
One of the things I relied on for my main site, which goes back to 1998, is that I'd converted it all to Markdown around 2006 when I first realized there were Markdown plugins for WordPress. Those plugins saved Markdown in a separate field and then the HTML-ified version in the main editing field.
Almost all third-party WordPress development on Markdown plugins stopped once Jetpack (an Automattic plugin) supported Markdown. Versions crept along, databases were converted from one major revision to the next.
I found that every time I'd log into my site to write a post, I'd spend enough time fussing with WordPress that I wouldn't actually write the entries I went there for. While WordPress had gotten out of my way oh so many years ago, now it was always in my way, and in very annoying ways. I stopped posting to my blog for over a year (extremely unusual).
And Then There's Migration
So I dumped my data, and then shut off my WordPress hosting. (Note: I knew better than to do this before the migration was final. I was just tired of the hassle, not to mention the cost.) I was unprepared for the annoyance of migration.
You see, the migration tools suck, and the import tools suck. The WordPress import tools have never imported images correctly, even from a WordPress export. That's just so broken.
And then I was hamstrung by something that's justā¦gobsmacking to me.
The Markdown That Isn't
First, let's look at a very simple WordPress post draft as it's being composed.
But here's how it's actually being stored in the database:
In text format:
<-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>This is a new post, and my default is set to markdown.</p>
<-- wp:paragraph -->
While putting HTML comments and paragraphs isn't forbidden in Markdown, of course, the idea that you'd only store garbage like that in lieu of the plain text you claimed to store is very much not only against the spirit of Markdown, but deceptive to one's customers.
And Here We Are
Despite all that, I did get the site migrated, and glad to be migrated. Looking forward to writing more, now that I won't be quite so annoyed by my blog any more. :P