WordPress Stories - a quick review

The WordPress app for Android prompted me to add a story!

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p>This is a new and experimental feature. Sadly, it isn't very good. Here's how it works.

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p>There's a brief description and some aspirational screenshots.

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p>There's a basic image picker. Then you get some basic tools to add text on top of your image.

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p>I know I'm a cynic, but this is a little underwhelming. It just posts an image to the blog. You can make it go full screen.

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p>This is it:

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p>There's a timer at the bottom, because you can add multiple images and it'll flip between them. You can make it go full screen. That's it.

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p>But it gets worse.

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p>WordPress emails my subscribers whenever I publish something new. It's like a Substack newsletter only cooler.

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p>This is what my subscribers see.

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p>That's just rubbish.

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p>Oh, and the icing on the cake? The WordPress Stories images don't have any alt text - so they're exclusionary.

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p>So, in conclusion, WordPress Stories aren't for me.

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p>Good to see them innovating. But I'm not sure if a low-feature image editor is going to drive people back to blogs.

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p>You can read more about Jetpack's WordPress Story Block on their support site.