A Follow Up To My WordPress Posting Issues

Last night I posted a story about a problem posting stories which wasn’t just affecting me, but some other people as well. While I had a workaround, it wasn’t optimal. That changed this morning when I got an email from a WordPress “happiness engineer” who I assume is their term for a tech support person. This is the email that I got:

Hi there!
 
We’ve recently received a tweet via X (Twitter) referring to an issue with posting on your site – itnerd.blog. Thank you for reaching out. I wanted to follow up here to make sure that’s addressed correctly 🙂
 
There seems to be a conflict with the new editor version and the AMP plugin. You can deactivate it from Plugins → Installed Plugins.
Our belief is the AMP plugin is no longer needed in most use cases, and you can keep it deactivated. But if you have a specific reason to re-enable please let me know and I can look into other solutions for you.
 
If you have any additional questions, don’t hesitate to let me know, I’d be happy to help!

So, the TL:DR is what this “happiness engineer” suggested worked. But let’s go into the weeds. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google came up with this a few years ago to make pages load faster on mobile devices.

AMP has two basic components:

  1. A way of writing small web-pages
  2. A way of caching/loading those small web-pages to make them quicker to load.

But it’s fallen out of favor because In order to use AMP, you also need to agree to allow anyone to “cache” the AMP versions of you web-pages. This means that they can take a copy of the page and direct people to that copy, rather than the original version on your web-site. Which is a #fail if you are trying increase traffic to your website. And some big social media sites don’t like AMP at all. Reddit for example gives you a warning if you use an AMP link in a Reddit post.

So the suggestion from WordPress that AMP isn’t needed anymore has some degree of validity. Which is why I disabled it on my site. But the thing is that WordPress clearly broke something when they updated the post editor. Hopefully they don’t press the “easy button” and make this default solution for this issue because there’s clearly a bug that they need to fix. Plus it was working up until 1PM EST yesterday which supports the fact that they broke something. So here’s hoping that they do the right thing that will help users and themselves in the long term.

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