A little communication would kill you, WordPress?

Totally silly, and not in a good way—what I am about to tell you.

I try to schedule blog posts in advance.  The main reason for this is I was not enjoying the jolt at 11 pm when I would suddenly think, “OMG!  I forgot to do my blog post for tomorrow!”  Life—and blogging—has been much more pleasant since I have mastered the “Schedule” function of WordPress.  (Always remembering that when I say “mastered,” I really mean “figured out how to make it work more than half the time.”)

But here’s what happened as I tried to schedule yesterday’s post.

I admit it was not my finest hour.  (It was actually only a minute, for one thing.)  But that minute could have gone so much better if only WordPress had decided to communicate more clearly.

I had been happily galumphing along scheduling posts for February 26th and 27th.  I didn’t have an idea yet for the 28th, so I skipped that.  There would be time.  (I’m ahead!  Yay!)  Two days after the 27th comes the 29th, right?

Except not, of course, in February—unless it’s Leap Year—which, you know, still confuses me.  What, exactly, is the necessity?  I can never remember.  Something about clocks, and losing seconds every hundred years, so that if we didn’t have Leap Year, along about 2250, it would be dark at 10:30 in the morning and December 25th would be in August.  Or something.)

Anyway, there’s no 29th of February this year.

But does WordPress tell me that?

Oh, no.

It just freezes.

(But not in August, at least.)

It freezes, and apparently nothing can be done.

Horror!  Dismay!  Will I lose the post?  (Admittedly, it’s probably not one of my better ones, but still—I spent time on it.)

Fortunately, and to my surprise, the Save Draft button still worked.  So, good.  I wasn’t going to lose the post.  However, the Publish date now read Feb 1st.  Already rattled by the freezing of my PC, I tried again to schedule the post for February 29th.

Another round of freezing.

This time, however, I paid attention to the tiny little red border around all the date boxes.

Is that…?  Could it mean…?  Oh!  Of course!  There is no February 29th!

Reset to March 1st, and problem solved.

Or so you would think.  But, no.  Now, it appears the post will be scheduled for March 1st, 1970.   Really?  1970?

Did somebody invent a time tunnel and forget to tell me?

So, I fixed it, of course, and the post will appear as intended and scheduled on March 1st of this year.  In fact, it already has.  (Maybe it’s me who invented the time tunnel?)

But would it have killed you, WordPress, to display an alert that said, I don’t know, something like “Invalid Date?”  You know, like almost every other software package in the world.

And maybe I’m being overly demanding, but I think you might just have mentioned that 1970 was a date in the past.  I didn’t need you to scream, “That’s forty-two years ago, you dummie!”—but a little nudge would not have come amiss.  “This date is in the past.  Are you sure?” could have been murmured in a little pop-up box.

I just mention it, you know.  Because communication is the key to any successful relationship.