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I haven’t complained about WordPress in a while, so here it goes.

– Where’s my circle-I?

The other night, I started typing and I realized that something was missing. As recently as, say, a week ago, there was a lowercase “i” in a circle at the top-left corner of my WordPress editing screen. Today, it is gone.

So what’s the big deal?

Among several reasons I write in this blog, one is for my own self-improvement. Some time around 5+ years ago, I decided it would benefit me to write on a regular basis. Blogging works for me because I find that writing for public consumption requires some additional discipline that merely writing for one’s own self would lack. While I do, occasionally, write professionally or for public consumption, it is not something I’d do on a regular basis – certainly not a daily basis.

To impose discipline, I set myself a daily word target. At first it was difficult. I would often have to force myself to generate extra prose that I didn’t think I had in me, just to make my quota. As is the nature of habits, though, the longer I did it, the more natural it became to generate a daily stream. These days, it is hard not to greatly exceed my targets every day without fail. In fact, I feel pretty bad if I get to the end of a day and realize I haven’t written at least a few hundred words.

Whether that’s made me better at anything that counts is another story. Nonetheless, it is a reason that I keep doing, here, what I do.

Part of making this work is that I need to know how many words I’ve written during a sitting. Back when I started, the (old, classic) editor had a feature that allowed selecting of text so as to display the number of words highlighted. With WordPress’ shift to blocks, I found myself only able to get the current state of the draft, so I’ve got myself into the habit of noting my starting and ending word count for a given day. I obtained that count via said “information” icon (the i in the circle). That is the icon which is now gone.

Immediately I began searching the internet, the WordPress help sites, and the output of my fellow bloggers. Surely this feature was leaned on by many. I think a lot of writers – amateur, professional, and sloppily self-indulgent – work with word-output as a goal. Was this a bug, that we should expect to shortly be fixed? Was it replaced by another, maybe better, function?

Since I found nothing, I decided to write the post myself.

Frustrated, I ended up clicking on everything I could find and eventually located a live tally of both words and characters. It is shown on the screenshot, above, and is accessible via the “List View” menu choice (the staggered horizontal lines that was next to the circle-i, when it was where it was). Once in “List View” one has to change to “Outline” view to get the counts.

It’s still mildly frustrating because it is now one click deeper than it use to be. I’m sure I will learn to live with it, as I always do. I’m just surprised that I can’t find anyone else squawking along with me.

On the upside, I’ve got an easy 560 words!

Game pairing: Writers.