I came here to post the third and last in my “stupidest things in the world” series only to find that WordPress has unilaterally, and without warning, changed the theme of my blog, the utter morons.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

In the stupid new theme, all the stuff in the sidebar has gone. Vanished. All of it. Want to see the links to most recent posts? Well, you can’t. Want to see the most recent comments? Tough luck. Want to see that useful list of links to the most popular articles? WordPress says NO. Interested in the category cloud? Sorry to hear that, it’s not there any more.

The good news is that WordPress says the new theme is better. Well, isn’t that nice to know? That’s “better” in the sense of “lacking all the stuff I had before”. On the positive side, I do now have a big shiny button at the top of my sidebar telling the reader that Akismet has blocked 948 spam comments. Well, whoopy-doo! This is great! Because the very first thing I want to see when I visit someone’s blog is how many spam comments have been blocked there. That is way more important and interesting than, say, the recently posted articles. Who cares about that any more? Content is so 2009.

I might — might — be able to get my sidebar stuff back again. From the forum postings, it seems that some people have and some haven’t. We’ll see. But but but but but! I don’t want to spend my time wresting with the dashboard in an attempt to reinstate the chrome I already had, I want to spend it writing actual, you know, blog entries. Articles. Content. Instead, I resign myself to a futile and unrewarding evening deep in the bowels of the configuration UI.

What a crock.

To be clear, it is great that WordPress provides this blog-hosting service, and awesome that it does it at zero cost. But I don’t for the life of me see why that means they would want to, or feel it’s acceptable to, pull a crappy stunt like this. This sucks.

I guess my days of telling all my Blogger-hosted friends to move across to WordPress are over.