Month: August 2025

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Blogging Platforms in 2025

I’m not sure how many of you readers out there have been following this blog since its inception in 2002, but it has gone through many changes over the years. In the beginning, it was a simple HTML and PHP site that I maintained by hand. I eventually learned more about databases, hosting, and various blogging platforms.

Somewhere around 2003 this blog became powered by B2/Cafelog, from which WordPress was eventually forked by Matt Mullenweg. WordPress quickly became awesome, and that is what powered this blog for decades.

About a year ago, I grew really frustrated with the WordPress ecosystem because every time I’d log into the dashboard, it was slower. I was getting spammed by plugins trying to get me to upgrade or buy related plugins. I realized that sometimes I would install a plugin and it would install other plugins without my permission.

This annoying tactic became totally unacceptable to me. So I looked for a way out and I found Ghost CMS. I set myself up over there on that platform for about four or five months, but I realized customizing it was really difficult. And it was expensive.

Spending $25+ a month for a hobby blog just didn’t feel like it was worth it to me. I do maintain the strong opinion that Ghost is an excellent alternative to Substack, which I refuse to link to, but that is a story for another day.

So I migrated away from Ghost and I found Chyrp Lite, which ran this site for about eight more months, right up until a few weeks ago. Chyrp Lite was really cool. It was a basic PHP-based, MySQL database-driven blog platform that did what it needed to simply and quickly.

It was reminiscent of something you would find around the year 2008. I thought it was pretty cool, but once again, it felt rather limited and difficult to customize. It also didn’t feel like there was a lot of ongoing development to support it.

So I had a stroke of imagination one night and started wondering about forks of WordPress to see if anyone had taken the code base, which is open source, and forked it into something less cluttered and less heavy.

Sure enough, Classic Press existed. It gets rid of the Gutenberg editor in WordPress, which was controversial when it came out in the first place and I never really cared for. Classic Press is like a modern version of WordPress from 10 years ago, but it receives updates and is secure, and it is compatible with a lot of current plugins and themes out there.

That said, I’m trying to keep it simple here and I’ve been using one of the default WordPress themes, Twenty Seventeen, and am customizing that to my liking.

So far, it’s smooth, it’s fast, it’s lean, it’s clean, and I’m not getting spammed on the admin panels. You should check it out if you’re a blogger and you’re tired of how bogged down WordPress has become with all kinds of freemium plugin spam.

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The Tennis Channel App on Roku – Crashes and other problems

I signed up for a year of The Tennis Channel on my Roku TV in March. At first, it worked pretty well, though I noticed the audio and video would get out of sync pretty quickly. Restarting the app would fix it until the next commercial break. That was highly annoying, and I learned that many other people were having the same problem with no resolution.

That said, I discovered that pausing and restarting the stream would fix it, so I learned to live with it.

However, a few weeks ago, the whole app started crashing as soon as I selected a stream to watch – either live or pre-recorded.

I tried all the usual troubleshooting steps: rebooting the Roku, updating everything, reinstalling the Tennis Channel app, but nothing worked. This was the case for my TCL Roku TV and two Roku devices connected to other TV’s in my house.

Frustrated, my wife called Tennis Channel Support and the person on the other end of the line said “many other people are having the same problem.”
They said they’d be sending an email to tech support, which we soon got a response from. The email asked us to do all the same troubleshooting steps we’d already done! I did them again just to be sure, but no, nothing worked.
I started asking for a refund for my unused ~8 months of service, but Tennis Channel gave me a dubious denial:

You are requesting a full refund, which we cannot approve at this time. Your subscription was made with your own personal email, indicating that you signed up and agreed to the terms of service.

Alas, I was not requesting a full refund, I was requesting the remainder of the year I paid for, which I am unable to use because their crappy app isn’t working.
So, I filed a complaint with the FTC, who suggested I also file a complaint with my state’s Attorney General.

Done and done. You should do the same if you are having these problems!

Update – The Next Day – August 6

Turns out reporting them to the FTC actually worked. A day later I got a refund for the unused portion of the year I paid for!

Thank you for contacting Tennis Channel Customer Service!
We can confirm that your membership under this email address is now canceled, so you will not be billed in the future. We have also issued a refund for the remaining months of your subscription.

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