admin@worldsworstwriter.org 2024-10-09
This started long ago posting travel pictures on a web page to share with family and friends. The pictures tell the story. The writing takes the readers along for the ride.
My Wordpress blog had been online for 5 years. There were 897 views. Three from Australia. One from Brazil. One more from Singapore. 5 US. The rest were web crawlers and my own edits. There were ads at the bottom with pictures of unrecognizable horrible looking vegetables. Then all of a sudden the advertisers abandoned the blog. Maybe the horrible vegetable ad executives thought the articles made their ads look bad. Maybe I am the world's worst writer. In total there were ten readers. Five of them international. Maybe things aren't so bad after all.
The world's worst writers need to make their writing look as good as possible. We spend a lot of time on graphics, layout, fonts, and colors to distract the readers from the writing. My Wordpress theme is called typo. Typo is the least worst of the free Wordpress themes. The navigation menu is at the top. When a hapless reader clicks on the menu nothing happens. The reader is thinking this stupid thing is broken.
Scrolling down below the menu reveals the article. Now the reader is pissed off. I have to figure out how this freaking web page works to read this trash?
Something had to be done. The WordPress menu was driving readers away before they even read anything. Bad writers need as little friction as possible before the reader gets bored and finds something else to do.
This article from John Ankarstrom about writing HTML in HTML caught my attention. http://john.ankarstrom.se/html. I related to his opening line I'm not lying: this is the last time I'm ever going to rewrite my website.
John recommended Seamonkey, but I ended up using nano and self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi Zero. This was another distraction from writing. I am not kidding myself, this is not the last time I am rewriting these web pages. The article HTML Template has the poorly written details.
Driving these rewrites is simply seeing another web site, like John Ankarstrom's, with a nice font or cool layout and thinking let's try this on my 114 web pages. So I edit 114 different web pages so people can't see how bad the old web pages were. Then I edited all the files to add a common CSS file. Now the typefaces and font sizes on all 114 web pages can be changed on a whim by editing one file. However, structural changes require editing 114 files. Sure some of it can be done programatically, but in general it takes about the same time to edit the files by hand as writing a program. The last mass edit was to move the author and date line from the bottom of the file to the top under the title. Don't ask why I put the author and date at the end of the article. It was a really stupid reason that had to do with the large space between the <h1> title and the <p> author date line. The first thing I look for in web articles is the author and date and think poorly of those that don't have one. Which is why I spent 3 hours moving the date with the title 114 times. Bah.
Even the world's worst writers taste in other writers is suspect. One of my favorite writers is Hermann Hesse and his book Siddartha. The New Yorker wrote an article about how perpetually unfashionable Mr. Hesse is among the critics. They piled on attacking Mr Hesse calling him a little man. They said his readers were adolescents that had never grown up. The only criticism they missed was that one of his readers is the world's worst writer. If the critics can savage a Nobel Prize winning writer, they would have a field day on my Wordpress blog. Infuriated, I penned another poorly written piece called In Defense of Hermann Hesse. Adam Kirsch is not getting a Christmas card from me this year. He would probably criticize my syntax and adolescent message: "We want to wish you a Merry Christmas."
The worst writers will sometimes do opposition research on other bad writers. It helps to know how low the bar is. The Wikipedia list of books considered the worst has a surprising entry: the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Salman Rushdie called it a novel so bad it gives bad novels a bad name.
It was encouraging this book sold 80 million copies. There was no dirt on Salman Rushdie though. His quote what kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
is way better than my quote There is nothing demilitarized about a demilitarized zone.