Seriously, don’t you know that feeling of recalling something, but everywhere you look it’s not mentioned?
I swear I am not crazy, and wordpress used to be a great place.
If you ever read a blog entry I made, you’d know I have serious issues with WordPress even if I use it myself – maybe it’s because I use it, that I have problems with their service. I went and looked, and I made my account with WordPress in August 2009, that is 14 years!
let that sink in – 14 fucking years!
And it used to be a great open source playground for creating some of the best looking blogs available, if you knew a little html. I am from the stoneage, remember? But you could seriously implement just about anything, html or CSS. It never did support iframe – I actually stumbled across this forum post from ’15 with some dude that was using wordpress to promote something called wideo.co (never heard of it), but he was told pretty firmly that they didn’t care, wordpress didn’t support iframe, end of. But the reason for me dragging this out of the mud, is that he rightfully wonders why, and asks if there is any way they can help develop a plug that will let them use their code. And the support person sends them a link to the same forum as the thread is in, to make the poor man rephrase it to ‘an idea’. Note that it’s 7 years since he was active.
So in my search for when things changed, I stumbled across this post from ’22 – where the OP asks why the plugins were not available for free accounts anymore, and the gem who decided to answer said:
And then I seriously questioned my sanity for a moment, because I remember it was free to use plugins, and I had a hard time figuring out when to use plugins and when to use widgets, and were super surprised when I took a blogging break to come back and it was not available. So I know this lady is wrong – wordpress was (and to some extend still is) open source. So I set about to see what I could find, and it was fucking infuriating.
PLUGINS ARE NOT FUCKING FREE! YOU HAVE TO PAY A DIRT EXPENSIVE BUSINESS PLAN TO USE THEM! I admit that if you pay that, then yeah a lot of them don’t aquire additional payments or subscribtions… but that does not make them fucking free okay?
I do understand why people are confused, because when you look at the payment plans, it used to say ‘custom plugins’ not just plugins. And I do recall that some plugins were onetime purchase, much like an app – but to use it – the ABILITY to use a plugin was free. But no matter how hard I searched I just kept finding stupid shit like this or this. But I also fell across something else, which was this super legit question. which in short in case you can’t be bothered to click the link, is someone asking why they suddenly can’t add a plugin they created themselves on their own site. – That is actually a very legit question – and somehow confirmed to me that I was right, plugins were not always behind a very expensive plan, there is this post from ’17 asking why they can’t use plugins on their free plan anymore.
But I stumbled across this post from ’17 as well – and another chick with too much time on her hands, gives us her wisdom. the OP asks why they can’t use free plugins on their free account (like 90% of everyone else on their forums) and the lady says:
which is also just untrue. Because FTP (File Transfer Protocol) was one of the MAJOR selling points of wordpress back then, because internet was slow and expensive, we just got out of the 56k modem days okay? and blogging online was not for everyones internet plan. So to be able to download the blog and work it in something like cPanel, or Filezilla (or whatever program you used for it) and you could do your stuff offline, and then connect to your blog and WP servers, and update the sites you needed to update. I did go look and WP still have a site in regards to FTP, updated this year. There is actually a great tutorial on how to – here.
How I wish people would keep their great misguided advise to themselves. And I read through many posts on the wordpress forums, and this lady, timethief, she really lives up to her name – giving shit advise all over the place, making everyone, including me – run in circles.
And that is when I stumbled across this post on Reddit . They basically asks the same question as everyone else, but someone further down in the comments says ‘a lot have happened in 8 years’ and so I went unto looking at WordPress’ own business plan. And it does line up pretty well – and sanity restored.
Plugins on wordpress was available to everyone at one point, that was before there existed paid plans, and when wordpress was purely open source. Some plugins required a one time payment if you wanted to use them, but they were for commercial use mostly, and I never used them.
I can tell that wordpres transferred from the original dev to the wordpress foundation or whatever it was called, in 2010 – that lines up with what I seem to recall about the changes that happened, like you could suddenly pay for a custom url, and didn’t have to use the dreaded somethingsmart.wordpress.com. and you could purchase somethingsmart.com. Most people circumvented this with FTP, because you could (and still can I think) integrate the blog into your own website and ergo domain.
And when I returned to use wordpress – I was lost in livejournal and ezboards for a couple of years there. Everything had changed.
I can’t for the life of me understand the business decision from WP barring everyone from using plugins, but i think the same reason you can’t use iframe – they say it’s a security issues – I say it’s a wild west issue! They don’t want people to start making their own stuff, they need control of it, and ergo the money. So if you allowed the ability to use plugins, people would make pirate plugins, so the only way to make sure that doesn’t happen – is to bar everyone who isn’t neck deep in, from the party.
I mean I get it that the free option is limited, sure. But I pay for a personal plan for instance, just to get rid of ads, and to have my own domain (and the .blog extension) – it’s not much I pay sure, but I honestly don’t understand why plugins isn’t available to paid accounts, just the social ones – and not the commercial ones? – it bugs the fuck out of me that I can’t use plugins, and so help me I will find a workaround.
which brings me to what I actually wanted to talk about, but ended up in a tyrade about plugins. because as I ranted over before, I wish I could have nice looking feeds, or pretty embedded links. None of that is doable, I spent most day screaming at my computer. The basic wordpress does have an RSS option, which is neat, but it doesn’t give you a nice feed, like those in my sidebar, or the instagram one on my about page -or the pinterest one on my Darkstar page.
No you can get something like this:
You don’t get a custom title, even if you created one, and you also don’t get images or anything – it’s as basic as it gets. But it’s there. You can create rss feeds from most sites, but in this case it’s blogspot, and the easiest way of doing that is adding the below code to your blog url.
/feeds/posts/defaultNow the easiest way I know is to use feedburner, so go there and click the +create proxy, and paste your url with the rss extension into the popup, and it will make your feed. Then it takes you back to the main site and you click on configure proxy to access your feed, and copy your new rss feed url.
That url is what you enter into the RSS widget here on wordpress, or anywhere else really. Because what you have is an RSS code, but you need an RSS reader too for it not just to be a string of code. So Feeder is free and pretty neat, and you can have 200 feeds on your free plan. so DO IT!!
So let’s take my free graphics blog, when using the rss feed built into wordpress it looks like this – but when you look at it in Feeder, it looks like this (default)
And a neat thing because here you only see the first image of the post – but I upload like 3 to 5 images in one post. Feeder will let you tweak your feed so you can see the actual post within Feeder. Sadly I can’t link you because it’s a private setting in my RSS reader, and not the feed. the feed sadly looks like the one above. And my point? That I can’t make a nice precentable feed without a plugin – fuck you too WP.
There is however a weird workaround, if you use any of the feeds that does work neatly. Like insta or pinterest. So check this;
DREAMS OF A LOST MOONCHILD 
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