The Internet is broken. That’s what it feels like from my egocentric perspective.

This blog has become as slow as slow thing that has to be routed via one of Saturn’s moons before it even contemplates loading on my pc. I was already annoyed at not being able to see the content of a fair number of real comments, while being inundated with ever more subtly- Akismet-dodging spam comments. Add the irritation of not being able to comment on other blog’s posts – any comments I make are apparently sent but disappear into the ether(net) unless they are so short and irrelevant that they might as well be spam.

TW assumed that the blog had to upgrade to the latest WordPress. Unfortunately he now has a connection that will stay on-line for about 2 minutes before it drops packets, and/or throws him offline, making my tortoise seem like a comparative gazelle with a rocket in its butt.

He upgraded. The blog promptly broke.

He fixed it. The blog dropped all its UTW tags for the past week. In fairness, the tag cloud had become well a mushroom cloud rather than a modest cumulonimbus. There were getting on for 3 thousand tags, with hundreds of semi-duplicates.

I culled them by about a hundred, insofar as it was possible, because it takes about a minute to delete one. (You have to wait while the page refreshes after each deletion. Think about that while you blithely tag everything to within an inch of its life…)

I recklessly reimported the tags using the UTW compatibility upgrade. I didn’t do any of the procedures that claimed to be “scary.” (I am a coward.) It now seems that I’ve lost the tags off a few more posts. And there is definitely no sign of the tag list that used to let us (at least try to) assign existing tags rather can carry on creating misspelled version and plurals of perfectly serviceable tags.

Bah.

So, sorry if this blog seems to be acting unpredictable. It will get sorted soon… … … …