wordpress™ wank

Let me get this straight. You ask Denis Radenkovic (you know, the guy who did that header for joshuaink.com) to design you a new logo, and you toss all his suggestions aside in favour of this:

Get this. It’s not even wordpress.com-specific any more. It’s in the frigging beta.

Forgive the overuse of italics, I am trying to think of other ways to express my horror. Of course, I could take a tip from the logo and put everything in CAPITAL LETTERS. And then MAKE IT BOLD. And then UNDERLINE IT TOO.

(I would have MADE IT HUGE too, but the editor stripped out my <span>. Evidently it could not bear to inflict that level of ugliness on the world.)

I suppose we should be grateful they stopped at bold underline small-caps, restricted outlining to the redundant W and didn’t italicise and highlight. Small mercies.

Here, for sake of comparison, is the previous logo:

OK, that needed to go, what with its Internet Blue and its ‘I was thrown together in three seconds on Photoshop’ vibe. But compared to fugly up there it’s growing on me. It at least had the virtue of simplicity. (No other virtues, obviously, but one is better than none).

And that extra W? What is that? If you’re going to do a lame pun on WWW do a lame pun on WWW and give us three of them. If you’re not going to do a lame pun on WWW (and we’d really rather you didn’t), use one. WWordPress doesn’t mean anything.

(Again with the italics. Yeah, I’m sorry.)

Although, in fairness, Mr Radenkovic’s suggestions weren’t all that either. His w-shaped/speech bubble/heart blobs were a little bit twee and might have made people think WordPress was a tool for girls. Especially the multi-coloured ones. (Not that they ever had a chance, being, you know, multi-coloured). And if this one had been picked:

there would have been serious mockery over at Flock Sucks. Which would have been fully deserved.

See, I’m not saying they need a meaningless blobthing like all the others. Just something simple and functional that doesn’t make me want to eat my eyeballs.

omg one of the two new wordpress.com themes has a colour other than grey, green, or blue on it! Namely yellow. I nearly died.

Don’t panic, it is still primarily blue and grey. And the other one is untainted by non-blue-grey colours, so, you know, nobody’s going to start thinking girls blog here or anything.

Every single one of the ten themes currently available is two-col with the sidebar on the right. I’m thinking they must all be using the same php templates and only varying the CSS, but even so.

(This is where, if I were posting on the forums circa 2003, I would give a link to the Zen Garden and say ‘look at the miracles that can be achieved by editing the stylesheet alone! you don’t need to mess with that crazy xhtml stuff!’ But I’m not, so I won’t.)

It is no longer necessary to download Flock/ download a useragent plugin/ arselick a geek to get an account on wordpress.com, presumably because of the flood of people downloading the beta and needing wanting API keys for Akismet likerightnowthissecond.

I suppose that means I’m no longer one of the elite. Weep.

(My desire to turn this blog pink grows apace. If we don’t get something non-blue/green/grey soon, I may have to resort to Kubrick with a pink header. That would make me weep even more.)

Picked at random from the ‘WordPress 2.0 is in beta!!!!’ posts:

Just one thing I didn’t like and lot of others from my discussions with them is the bundling of Akismet with this release.
The plugin does work but you need a WordPress.com API Key, which means you need a WordPress.com account, which means lot of dead signups at WP.com just for the API key, because all users won’t really be bothering to use their WP.com accounts!
Well, it’s the developers choice I guess

This is totally unsurprising.

I’m going to explain one more time about Akismet, for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t already been subjected to my livejournal rantings.

There is no such thing as a dead sign-up. OK, if you are looking to create a thriving and vibrant blog community there patently is such a thing as a dead sign-up, because 90% of your site being single entry ‘Hello world!’ googleclutter doesn’t make for a thriving and vibrant community, plus of course there are the namespace issues (people get surprisingly narked about their desired usernames being snaffled by people who never bother to use them.) A lot of us have this primitive sense that these unblogs are, somehow, wasting space that could be better used. I know, I know. Disk space is cheap, and they don’t even exist until we (or, more likely, Google) call upon the idle database to generate them. I said it was primitive.

However, if you are looking to get mentioned in every article about blogging /sell a lot of advertising /get bought by Yahoo!, what matters is the number of accounts you can claim, not the number of active users. In the same way, if you have a deal with Flock to push people their way in return for them pushing them yours, it doesn’t matter whether they ever use Flock again; it still gets counted as a download, and it still looks good when they tell the investors about it, and everyone gets to blow the Web 2.0 bubble that little bit bigger.

The other nice thing about inactive users is that they bump up your figures and boost your pagerank while putting next to no burden on the server. They don’t drain your resources the way high-traffic sites are wont to do.

I’ve always liked the way livejournal distinguishes between active and inactive users. They can afford to do so because they actually are a thriving and vibrant blog community that has been going for years. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a newcomer that can’t, as yet, make any such claims (and, if the feeds on the Dashboard are anything to go by, won’t be able to for a while) so they have to rely on other ways to attract sign-ups and investors. There will be no differentiation here between active and inactive, depend upon it.

In conclusion, it looks like Matt may finally have got the hang of marketing. Even though calling the new release 2.0 is sort of wanky, like ‘yes we are jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon but we are doing so in a knowing and ever-so-slightly ironic way so you mustn’t take it too seriously. It’s only a release number. lol.’

(No, I can’t explain how I’m getting all that from a release number. It’s nuance, OK?)

Should I host another theme competition? asks Mr King.

The short answer to this is ‘no’.

The long and reasoned answer is: I doubt very much he can afford the time or the money. Yeah, people will bung him cash and/or server space, but they ain’t going to do any actual work on this. They may say they’re prepared to help out, but watch them disappear given the prospect of forty ten-file folders to comb for PHP errors and vulnerabilities. There are, like, five people in the WordPress community competent to evaluate the technical and design aspects of a theme (does it validate? is it accessible? is it easy to navigate? does it work across different browsers and resolutions? does it manage not to look like crap?) and they all have better things to do than comb through other people’s stuff for a pittance. However much random people say they’re willing to put up, it won’t be equivalent to consultancy rates.

People need to start getting real about this. You can’t demand the guy bankrupts himself putting on a competition just because you want another four zillion blue-and-grey two-col themes to pick from.

Besides which, unless 1.5 themes are going to break in 1.6/1.75/2.0/whatever the hell they’re calling it this week (in which case WP itself is kind of broken) we don’t need any more crappy themes. No, actually, even if they do break, we don’t need any more crap to wade through. Please.

Good themes get made regardless of competitions. Good themes get made because the designer sees a gap that the other themes aren’t filling, whether it’s aesthetic or technical or both. Crappy themes get made because a call for entries goes out and everyone thinks they have a chance of getting traffic/publicity/money because they slapped a new header and background on Kubrick and changed the link colours.

There’ll be a hundred or so themes that can’t be used on people’s legacy 1.5 installs (and if you think everyone upgrades the moment a major new release comes out, you are on crack) and can’t be used on wordpress.com because it will take Matt months to decide which (if any) are worthy of his Chosen Few.

Of course, if Alex King decides not to run another competition he kind of loses his status within the community (ok, being ‘template contest guy’ isn’t a great position, but it’s more prestige than most of the other ex-developers get) and also an awful lot of traffic, but it may also be time to acknowledge that amateurism has had its day. It was fine when WordPress was just a little b2 fork made by hackers for hackers, but it’s grown beyond that now. What they actually need to be doing is copying Blogger: asking professionals to design themes for wordpress.com (employing someone to design the site itself wouldn’t be a bad idea either, come to think of it) and paying them properly. A couple of ads and a few more Flock-style deals on the .com should cover it. Then I could replace this template with something pink.

• I HATE the massiveness of the font in the post title box. It’s like I’ve stumbled into my dad’s IE install. I don’t have diabetic retinopathy and I feel like I’m being shouted at.
• Clicking on ‘HTML’ resizes the browser window and brings up a blank textbox? WTF is that? If I want to insert an linebreak I have to start my whole entry from scratch? WYSIWYG is so getting turned off as soon as I finish this entry.
• The entry box resizes when you click and drag on the corner, though. That’s pretty cool.
• The developer links in the blogroll are no longer automatically added. This is a goodness. I would not have been happy with Alex King in my sidebar for a millisecond. What does he even do for WordPress these days, other than bitch about fellow PHP coders not bothering to check other people’s themes for him?
• Category creation is available from the post category menu. That is such a sensible idea you wonder why it was never done before.
• Sans serif in the backend looks way more professional than the Georgia ever did, however the majority of links are still Internet Blue and their ugliness makes me want to cry
• Not enough themes, of course. At the very least, we should have Rin; it’s a classy template, solidly coded, and it came second in the theme contest so I can’t really understand why it never made it to Matt’s Chosen Few. It’s blue and grey, isn’t that sufficient?

I just wanted to see whether cheating my way to an invite would work.

Because I wanted to screw flock.

Because as far as I can see Flock is just a Firefox fork trying to market itself as revolutionary, and things that market themselves as revolutionary without being so in the slightest irritate me.

Because, come on, how could I not?

Oh, right, hitting return once starts a new paragraph. How do I insert linebreaks, then?

I’m just not feeling this wysiwyg editor. At all.

Also, this template is still shit, but at least it is not Kubrick. And at least Dave Shea is fit.

(Also feeling the lack of a livejournal importer, of course. I imagine that is not a top priority.)