wordpress™ wank

This guy started a thread in the ‘Miscellaneous’ section of the forums questioning WP’s involvement with Yahoo!, on the grounds that the latter have been co-operating with the Chinese government in censoring information and helping convict dissidents.

(OMG he expects the people who sell page rank to spammers to care about ethics. That is so cute. I may have to go into a corner and squee for five minutes.)

By the way, that link to news.bbc.co.uk? I only got that because he had the presence of mind to save the thread as HTML and republish it on his own site, because naturally the thread got deleted. Well, duh. People weren’t allowed to criticise selling pagerank to spammers on the forum, so they sure as hell aren’t going to be allowed to criticise the decision to go into partnerships with big evil corporations.

I actually don’t have a problem with locking the thread. Time was when you could fill Miscellaneous with discussions of what your favourite browser was, but there are far too many users now to clog up the forum with non-support topics. (By the same token, ‘look at my new blog!’ should be nixed on sight). So I do agree that the poster’s blog is the best place to continue the discussion.

But how would I have known that these issues were being raised if he hadn’t posted a thread in the forum? He’s not syndicated on Planet WordPress (Happy Birthday Kim!), and I don’t know of another place where you can be sure of reaching a number of fellow wordpress users in order to discuss wordpress issues. Well, there’s here, but the only people who’ll find you here are fellow .com users, random googlers and people you’ve linked. And anyway, not everyone wants to talk about wordpress all the time (I know, shocking) or get a wordpress.com account for that purpose (still think Mike Little should, though).

And I, personally, am glad the issues were raised, and that I was able to read about them. I do think that it’s largely impractical to refuse to have dealings with companies who have a cosy relationship with the Chinese authorities. I’d have to stop using my computer entirely, not to mention quit watching Sky News. (Probably I should quit watching Sky News anyway, but I’m a great believer in knowing your enemy.) But I also think it’s something that needs to be confronted and considered, even if your ultimate decision is not to take any action.

Locking a thread is a politically neutral act carried out for the benefit of the forums, so that the discussion can move elsewhere. Deleting the thread is not. Deleting the thread is removing the right of users to read it for themselves and come to their own conclusions. Most of all, it makes you look really, really bad; same way as ‘we don’t want to talk about how pagerank got sold to spammers and you are, like, so evil for even mentioning it’ made a shady-looking situation look even shadier.

Don’t listen to me, listen to a wp-hackers regular.

Here’s another thing that’s messing with my brain. One day people are being told ‘don’t put this on a production site, it’s not finished! things will break!’ The next day, they’re told ‘go ahead! download the new shiny thing!’ And, in the interim, little has really changed. It’s not like Matt goes through Trac and says: ‘ok, now we’ve squashed this final bug that was holding us back, we’re ready for release’. He just looks at the calendar and say ‘ok, it’s Monday, we’re ready for release.’

If nothing else, the fact that the release hasn’t been announced on the dev blog proves that it wasn’t ready for primetime. I wonder whether they’ll put out the bugfix release straight away or hang about for the next security hole to be announced?

wow. Matt looked at the fugly logo of doom and thought: hmm, bold underlined dark blue is a really great look.

I have said it before. I will say it again. If it is bold it does not need to be underlined. If it is underlined it does not need to be bold. We are not so dim that we need three visual cues — colour, weight and underlining — to tell us something is a link. Two are sufficient.

[clicks on 'support' link]

Jesus Christ what has happened to the forum? Is that PINK?!? Is that Antarctic expanse of white on the left meant to be filled with ads and/or useful content when the site is finished, or is it just, you know, an Antarctic expanse of white? I love whitespace, but not quite that much.

And the forum links only work the second time you click on them; first time you get a 404. Always. Ah well, launching a site redesign on the same day as a new release was always going to work better on a theoretical level than a practical one.

Can somebody please explain how ‘Happy Birthday Kate’ and ‘Happy Birthday Chloe’ qualify as WordPress News, important enough to be syndicated to the dashboard of every independent WP installation on the planet? Obviously I have no objection to Kate and Chloe having happy birthdays, and appreciate that it can be pretty rough having a birthday this time of year, what with the potential for birthday/Christmas presentmerging… but I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what they’re doing on Planet WordPress.

I know most people ignore the dashboard anyway, but I am troubled by this inaccuracy. Perhaps 2.0 could change the heading to ‘Other WordPress News And Greetings To Family Members Of Developers’? Quick, quick, there’s still time!

e.t.a.: Alas, my proposed change did not make it in, but I have replaced the dashboard with Angsuman’s replacement and am now content.

The question remains, however, of why the hell nobody can fix up Mr. Little with a wordpress.com blog for any writing he may wish to do on wordpress, and syndicate that instead of his diary?

The fanboys are getting all excited about 2.0 coming out in time for Christmas. Do these people never learn?

I remember how they rushed 1.0 out to coincide with New Year. And had to rush out a bugfix version two weeks later. I appreciate that if you don’t have deadlines stuff never gets done, but public holidays are a ridiculous time to attempt major releases. Aren’t at least some of your team going to be travelling around and spending time away from the computer? (I know, shocking thought).

I’m still grappling with why RC1 (which, with my usual unerring sense of timing, I installed the day before RC2 came out) was called a ‘release candidate’ when it only had three options under the ‘import’ tab (excluding MT) and the livejournal, b2 and greymatter scripts existed only in the form of empty files. If they were planning on shipping it without half of their previously existing import options they need their heads read. If they weren’t planning on releasing it in that state why the hell were they calling it a release candidate? A release candidate is a candidate for release, is it not? Unless it has some other special meaning I am not quite geeky enough to understand.

It’s all about hype, and timetables — same syndrome as the inflated version numbers. I have yet to find any reason to ‘upgrade’ from 1.5.2 (or whatever the last one was, I can’t keep track) other than that the admin pages are prettier. This is moderately compelling but not quite enough to tempt me into the anguish of FTP.

Apparently, 2.0 is going to ship with an invalid feed on account of Atom 0.3 is no longer a valid or supported spec and Matt is refusing to support the new spec in the next release, or explain his reasons for this decision.

I was all ready to get, like, totally outraged about this but then I saw that Matt’s proposed solution when the demise of 0.3 was announced back in July (yes, July) was to provide an Atom 1.0 feed alongside all the others.

I have never understand why any blogging tool needs to provide four different types of feed, though I understand that this field is deeply deeply political and if you only had one variety then pointy-headed supporters of the others would probably come and burn your house down. Whatever. I certainly don’t understand why any blogging tool needs five types of feed.

Most WordPress users don’t know the difference between them or are even aware that they have them. They don’t know, for example, that they can easily be used to re-spew your original content on to splogs without so much as a by-your-leave, let alone a credit to the author. It could end up on livejournal. You might be really happy about that, or you might not be. The point is that your average non-geek is woefully underinformed about RSS, and having five different formats does not help. Really does not help. You cannot give them an explanation of why all these different formats coexist without involving pointy-headed fanatics, and once you introduce pointy-headed fanatics into the equation your user says ‘right, too advanced for me, I’ll just leave that’.

You don’t make people choose between different versions of the same theme written in HTML 3.2, HTML 4.0 and XHTML 1.0 Strict, do you? You pick a standard and you move to the latest official version. That is what the web standards movement is about. The only feed I used to offer on my main blog was an Atom one, because I don’t like unnecessary files clogging up the place and I don’t like Dave Winer. This may not have been the most informed decision ever, but I didn’t get any complaints. People geeky enough to care what types of feed get offered are geeky enough to download plugins that’ll give them the infinite amount they want.

(As usual, Shelley Powers makes more sense than anyone.)

Or, reason 24368894 why we don’t need any more theme contests. The results of Typo’s theme contest are in, and the entrants are not happy that the judging criteria were unclear, that the judges can’t be bothered to elucidate on why they chose the themes they did, and that a number of the winners suck.

Must be an open source thing.

(I do like Inkling, though, and am seriously considering porting it to WP.)

Well, I’m currently on a reasonably nippy broadband connection and it’s still taken ten minutes so far to upload 2.0 RC1. 6 — no, 7 — minutes remaining.

If someone were to fork a ‘wordpress-lite’ (like b2, but without the security holes) I would totally be up for using that.

1. Delete multiple items on my blogroll. You know how sometimes you just want to scratch everything and start fresh? I can hide them all (assuming that all links are currently visible, which isn’t actually the case), and I can assign them to the same category, but I can only delete them one at a time. As there are about fifty links (oh, and I’d have to confirm each deletion before it went ahead) it’s off to the database I go. Probably about the fifth time I’ve had to do this on various installs.
2. Backup. Yeah, I know there’s a plugin. Yeah, I know it’ll be bundled with 2.0. About bloody time. It should have been included in 1.0. You cannot expect people to upgrade their entire install every couple of months (another form of madness which I am sure I’ll have occasion to mention again) without building in a backup facility so they can protect their data beforehand. It’s a basic necessity, and the only reason I can think of for not bothering to provide it is that the developers thought that MT-style text exports or even database dumps would make it easier for people to switch to other software. The ease of exporting from MT certainly hit them where it hurt, back when everyone was freaking out about the licensing; but I still think, by and large, data portability helps retain more users than it allows to escape.

   (I wonder how many people are currently locked into wordpress.com because of the lack of an export facility? It may well be possible to coax posts into your own install by grabbing an RSS feed and importing that — don’t know, not tried it, not about to — but how many .com users just graduating to their own host are going to think of that?)

Today on the forums:

Why do you feel the need to insult and call me “incompetent?” You know nothing about me except that I don’t write code nor do I really want to learn how to. I have used other blog software before and none of it was this difficult or confusing. I thought this would be a solution since it was part of my hosting package and I would be saved the anguish of trying to upload software to my hosting companies servers. I can guarantee you that right now and in the near future people like me will be looking for such a solution, and if they meet up with difficult programs like this, it will reflect negatively on both the software provider and the hosting companies who bundle such software.

OK, well clearly ‘WPNewUser’ isn’t the most tech-savvy person in the world (FTP causes them anguish) but this doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Lots of otherwise intelligent people have a mental block when it comes to figuring out anything computer-related. I’ve seen this in my own family, and it drives me nuts because I don’t understand how someone so bright can fail to grasp something so simple. But then the reason it seems simple to me is because I’m interested in it, and because it’s a fair few years now since FTP was this scary advanced geek thing I didn’t know anything about. But once, you know, it was.

So this person has evidently been sold hosting on the basis that their blog will be automatically installed. It might be fantastico, it might be the dreamhost one-click installer. Don’t get me wrong, I love these things. If you’re on dial-up, as I occasionally still am, FTPing an entire WP install is anguish. If you don’t know which files are dispensable I imagine it’s even more so.

They are, however, fundamentally misleading for the inexperienced. One-click installs give the impression that all the work is already done for you. It’s not. If all you wanted was a plain vanilla Kubrick install, nothing more personal than the content and the title, you wouldn’t be forking out for hosting. You’d be here. But if our user actually wants to utilise many of the hundreds of themes and plugins available then yes, they are going to have to master FTP. Quite possibly they’ll need to get to grips with the intricacies of chmodding. If they want to accomplish even the most basic of customisations they’re going to need some knowledge of HTML and CSS. There are no WYSIWYG theme editors. This ain’t Geocities.

So here is this unfortunate new user assuming that WordPress must be a company with offices and shit because nobody has told them otherwise. The ‘blogosphere’ is so up its own arse it’s assumed that everyone already knows it’s an open source project presided over by Matt Mullenweg and that 2.0 is nearing release and that wordpress.com is the no-frills hosted version etc. etc. But most people — even people who blog, or people who want to, or people who’ve heard of blogging — don’t know that at all. They don’t even know what open source means until it’s explained to them, and even then it pretty much translates as ‘if you get technical support, think yourself lucky’.

And now — because their host misled them, because they were confused by the Codex, because the only place they could get interactive support was the bear-pit of the forums (if you mention #wordpress in this context that only proves how far away from the average blogger you are) — this person has been seriously deterred from using the software.

I wonder whether there’s a case for having a short ‘about wordpress’ blurb on the dashboard on first login, in place of all the confusing feeds. (Who is this Matt? Who is this Ryan? Why are they on my blog? What is this ‘WordPress development blog’ that hardly ever has any posts to it? Does that mean it’s not being developed any more?) You know the sort of thing: open source blah, every thing done by unpaid volunteers blah, Matt is God and if you say different the fanboys are going come and get you blah. The ideologues would go nuts for it. Just because hosts are being careless about informing people what they’re letting themselves in for doesn’t mean that WordPress itself shouldn’t help clear up the confusion.