wordpress™ wank

Overview of the market share of various blog tools :

I'm often amused by the petty bickering that goes on in the blogging community over which tool is better - Movable Type, WordPress, Expression Engine, etc. Who cares? In the consumer market, less than 1 percent of those wanting to blog have the skill level or desire to deal with HTML tags, let alone configuring scripts for a server. These tools will never win in the consumer space; they are just too difficult to use.

As you would expect, the wordpressers fail to get the point, complain about the methodology (she's been careless about the urls she actually searches for) and claim they're underrepresented. You could make the same claim about diaryland, which like Typepad has a passwording option (30% sounds like a reasonable figure there as well.) Or for livejournal, which quite possibly has more friends-locked journals than public ones (as well as an easy-to-implement option to block the Googlebot). Livejournal currently claims over 2.6 million active users.

Face it. Whichever way you slant it, the majority of bloggers will still be teenage girls. You could try and slant it by heading to Technorati for your stats, but those numbers wouldn't be any more truthful than these. The truth is that bloggers, especially the young female variety, are mercurial creatures; opening accounts all over the place, starting more than one blog on the same server, abandoning them when parents or stalkers or nicer usernames intervene. And yes, you could argue that such promiscuity makes it look like there's more of us than there really are; but even taking that into account, women and girls own this medium.

This is what freedom looks like. It's hard to measure.

I think most of my frustrations with wordpress have been borne of wanting things to be easier. Wishing you could find out how to do something without having to look in thirty different places. Wanting template tags to be more intuitive. Having to delve into the core files to get control over how the output's presented. But once you remind yourself that it is, and always will be, a minority tool by hackers for hackers, it's not so annoying anymore; and, to be honest, most of the annoyingness comes from the community rather than the actual software anyway.

(I have, by the way, decided to hold off on the upgrade for now, simply because my favourite plugins won't work on the test installation. Not prepared to junk lj-synching or dropdown comments for the debatable joys of theming. Put it this way: my site ain't broke, and if I attempt to fix it I'm fairly certain it will be.)

If WordPress 1.5 is officially released on Tuesday, and if MT is still having comment spam issues, the wordpressers are going to have to come up with some sort of coherent line on commercialisation.

So far, making money out of wordpress users has been akin to trying to get blood out of a stone. Either they're zealots who think there's something impure about attempting to profit from an open-source project, or they fled MT in horror at the prospect of having to pay for stuff, or (like most of us) they don't see any point in paying for something they can get for free. I charge for wordpress installations; how many people have taken me up on it? None. They'd be a bit daft to do so, when others refuse to put a monetary value on their time and expertise and will do it for nothing.

But we're getting to a stage now where the userbase is large enough for paid services to no longer be unthinkable; where wordpress is starting to become a serious competitor to MT. How about MT-style paid support? A site devoted to supporting the commercial site of WP? A wordpress book, to go with the half-dozen about Movable Type?

No, no, and no, say the wordpressers. I get that, completely. I get that they're scared of losing the community they have, scared that things will change, scared that the market will intrude on their little corner of the internet and start exploiting it, scared that others will make money out of doing what they've been doing for free. But that's what happens when you're successful. That's what happens when you grow; you become a victim of your own success. All they can do to stop it now is make sure that 1.5 ships with a bunch of bugs and be even more obnoxious in the forums than usual. I'm not sure even that will be enough.

There will be a WordPress book, sooner or later, whether they like it or not; it'll attract new users, whether they like it or not; and if the wordpressers take umbrage and leave, there will be other volunteers stepping in to fill the void, whether they like it or not, because the whole point of open source is that nobody is irreplaceable.

In the meantime, I don't think we've seen the last of the skirmishes.

more html markup sneaking in to function outputs. This stuff drives me insane. If I want all my link categories to be second-level headers (and why on earth would I? on n-t-u they are h3s because on that particular site I consider them less important than post titles) then I will insert the headers myself.

Semantically speaking, of course, they should simply be within an unordered list, with sublists underneath them; this establishes the hierarchy so headers are redundant. I don't do it that way because I'm not a semantics nut, but the wordpressers claim to care about semantics and should at least try to be consistent. Also, how are we meant to put together decent-looking themes and stylesheets when they throw random stuff like this into the mix without telling us?

And don’t say ‘well, you can always use one of the other tags to output your blogroll’, because the blogroll tags and their parameters Make No Sense and are continually breaking for no visible reason. (I was once forced to trawl through the source code in a vain attempt to figure out how they work.) I have strong suspicions that the Links Manager is nothing more or less than a b2 hack gone feral.

wordpress downloads stop working so chief support volunteer has to email the software to individuals on request.

I can't decide whether this level of amateurism is reassuring (hey, they'll never buy livejournal) or worrying.