I’m quite angry with WordPress at the moment.  After paying for the domain name, I’d rather not have PopPressed invading the bottom of posts with such trash as “What One Does in Paris If One Is a Carter or a Knowles.”  The blog remained advertisement-free until I upgraded, and now I have to pay another $30 to get rid of the ads that weren’t there before I registered the domain?  Furthermore, as I began posting a direct link to the Production Notebook on facebook, I noticed that the thumbnail showed the same photo to the link I’ve just mentioned.  So now Beyonce and Jay-Z have to be on my facebook page as well?  Blogger bubblegumcage3 sums it up very well when he says “it’s irrelevant and tacky, which makes it look like spam.”

I do not wish to say any more on the issue here than I already have (if I feel irrelevant advertisements do not belong on my blog, perhaps neither should lengthy discourse on the matter – besides, this already feels like a waste of time and blog-space), so good discussions about WordPress advertising, and what I gather to be relatively recent changes in WP policy, can be found here, here and here if you’re interested.  In the first link, a WP “Happiness Engineer” locks the discussion on the second page.

All said, I do like WordPress and have no intention of abandoning it (yet).  Nor, however, have I any intention to let WordPress use my posts to “occasionally” (occasionally, my ass – check the last half-dozen blog posts) place “discreet” (discreet, my ass – they are hideous and given precedence to “Likes” and comments) advertisements, so it seems I’ll be eating another $29.97, as I’ve already invested in the domain for a year, after which I may move this blog (admittedly unlikely).  I do, of course, understand that it costs money to run a hosting service, but this is essentially the same cost I’d be paying to self-host, only without the conveniences offered by WordPress.  While there are alternatives, I still find WP unmatched for those of us who are incapable of web design.  Fuckers.

P.S.  Did I mention that I can see the advertisements on nearly every post even though WP states that they try “very hard to not intrude or show ads to logged-in readers”?  Nonetheless, I’ve decided to wait a few days to see if they “make the ads display a bit better than they are now,” as they seem to be promising.