donncha wish your server was paid like mine
March 13, 2006 
Donncha let slip something interesting on the forums t’other day:
you wouldn’t believe the amount of traffic all those theme widgets and new features create!
[digression: even though I actually listened to that interminable podcast where the Irish guy pronounced Donncha to rhyme with 'Nietzsche' because Irish orthography makes no sense, I still get the Pussycat Dolls stuck in my head whenever he posts]
So seems to me at the moment there are at least three possible reasons why wordpress.com is broken. It could be that all of them are responsible. It could be two. It could be only one. There could be others we don’t even know about. (Like I keep saying, I’m not a developer so I’m operating in the dark here).
- The sidebar widgets are using up all the resources. More resources than anyone had anticipated, since I didn’t notice any beta-testing going on before they were unleashed on the entire community. And they’d be especially resource-intensive when they’re first rolled out and people are playing with the new toy even if they were happy with their sidebars as they were. Pulling in RSS feeds from all over the place can’t be helping either. My tip to the wordpress.com community: step away from the widgets, and for heaven’s sake stop bleating that your theme doesn’t let you have them. There’s a reason for that.
- The implementation of SSL was inadequately tested (are we noticing a pattern here?) and broke a lot of stuff that the admins didn’t know it would break. Or knew it would break, and didn’t care about.
- Or… it’s standard something-for-nothing overload. The servers simply cannot keep pace with the amount of traffic. It could be that there’s been an influx of new users who were previously put off by the small number of themes and inability to edit your sidebar. Or possibly there are just more people willing to trade Blogger’s customisablity for wordpress.com’s categories and pages than anyone at automattic imagined there would be.
I just thought of a fourth: maybe the sploggers and pornographers have cottoned on to the lack of a ToS and have descended in their hordes! Vast amounts of porn being uploaded through the inline editor might well have an impact on server load.
Honeymoon’s over, kids. It’s gonna be as buggy and broken as the bloggers and livejournals you fled from. When will people learn that you get what you pay for? That even if a free site runs smoothly to start, things will start to choke up as soon as everyone else discovers it?
compulsory self-congratulatory post
March 12, 2006 
I’m surprised by how much I’m missing the ugly blue navbar at the top of my blog. It was such a convenient way to get to my admin pages, not to mention surf to random blogs in languages I do not speak.
(Yes, it’s entirely my own fault I can’t read Spanish or Gujarati. Yes, it’s lovely that wordpress.com is such a multilingual community. But the lack of a language filter did render the ‘next blog’ feature rather pointless for monoglots.)
At least I am not bothered by the brokenness of stats, seeing as how I never look at the things — I cared about stats, too, when I first started blogging, but it soon gets old — and am rapidly adjusting to being logged out every time I switch pages. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my perambulations around the blog hosts, it’s that free stuff doesn’t always work properly. Quite a lot of the time paid stuff doesn’t work properly either. And if this blog was really important to me I wouldn’t be hosting it here anyway.
That reminds me though: time I took a backup. Apologies to anyone subscribed to my RSS feed who is about to be engulfed by every entry I’ve posted ever. Until this place emerges from the primeval ooze into a golden age of data portability, this is the way it has to be done.
this shit is bananas
March 7, 2006 
Well, first of all the theme competition guy says results will be posted on the 29th of February, a date which does not exist. And then he only posts a handful of the themes. And then he claims his site has been hacked and he didn’t have any backups. And then Shadow, who was meant to be judging and hosting the themes at wordpress.net, tells the .org forums he hasn’t heard anything from him, so the wordpress.net arrangement is presumably off. A bloke called Terry starts up a replacement competition with the wordpress.net hosting in place. He actually names some judges, which is a good start. The criteria remain vague, but come on guys, what were you expecting?
If nothing else, the conspiracy theories circulating about contest #1 are funny. Apparently theme designers don’t realise that GPLing their creations means they’ve basically signed away all their rights and anyone can bundle them up and sell them on. If that prospect bothers them they shouldn’t have entered in the first place.
When they’ve seen a little more wordpress wank, they’ll realise that most of what looks like evil conspiracy is actually just incompetence.
don’t you mean ‘make MEN more sensitive in the future’?
Tell you what. Let’s play ‘where are the women?’, it being, ooh, months, since I last had the excuse.
It’s not our fault. We’re not actively discriminating against women, they’re just aren’t any around.
No, it’s never your fault, is it, petal? I don’t suppose it occurs to you to ask why there might not be any around?
Matt, to be fair, does say:
I’m sure any women on this list could speak to challenges they’ve faced, and perhaps that would make people more sensitive in the future.
And nothing from the women. Because, I suspect, we’ve learned by now we’re not welcome on wp-hackers, and don’t waste our time there. I didn’t know that Kitty left ‘in anger’ (as I pointed out in my last post, there’s a lot I don’t know), but it doesn’t surprise me one little bit. Sooner or later, being involved with wordpress is going to make you angry, and while men are going to hang around and try to WIN, women are more likely to feel that the healthiest thing for them is to remove themselves from the cause of their anger and pursue less frustrating projects. They already know they’re not going to win. They know they’re not going to be listened to. Partly because they’re women, but mostly because they’re not Matt. I only lurk for the wank, and because it’s the only real way to keep up with what’s going to be in the next release.
Thing is, even if my PHP skills stretched beyond inept editing of other people’s code, I wouldn’t have the slightest interest in helping out with wordpress development. Fixing other people’s bugs, knowing that your patch will probably be ignored… nah. I’d be writing plugins. I’d be keeping out of the way of the geeks who assume everyone without ‘grrrl’ or ‘elle’ on the end of their username is male. It’s no accident that Lorelle and vkaryl, the only two active women in the wp community I can think of offhand, are older than the majority of the fanboys; they’re used to that kind of crap, can stand up for themselves, and aren’t going to be too bothered about how a bunch of little boys talk to each other.
But you know what the real problem is? Traditionally, women prefer to work by consensus. Decisions are discussed and agreed upon by the group, rather than made unilaterally by the leader. Obviously, this is a gross generalization (everyone has seen examples of dictatorship-by-women, of which the wp-docs archives are only one example), but I can say, hand on heart, that the autocratic structure of the project has always been a big issue for me. The needs of non-coders have never been listened to. Ever. The docs volunteers and the support volunteers have always been the poor relations, patronised by the hackers, given flaky software to work with, their pleas for actual coders to maybe drop in sometime and help out repeatedly ignored.
(You know the latest crackpot scheme? They’re going to shift the entire codex to a WP wiki plugin, presumably because Matt’s ego cannot bear for there to be any part of wordpress.org powered by software he didn’t write. Expect a custom-made bugtracker next.)
So yeah. Where are the women? Doing better things than wading through the wank, that’s what. Except me. I do it so you don’t have to.
great shiny iceberg
I have tried in vain to explain the whole backup plugin permissions furore without mentioning chmod. Or the ‘wp-content directory’. Or using the phrase ‘world-writable’. ‘World-writable’ is not an elegant phrase, even if it is way more descriptive than ‘777′ or a bunch of ticky boxes.
But I have given up because if you understood that paragraph, you don’t need things explained. Whereas if you switched off when I said ‘chmod’… best stay switched off, actually, and wait for me to start bitching about themes again.
That said, when somebody says ‘Caution: inflammatory post follows’ I have to link to it, otherwise I would be failing in my duty to bring you the very best bitterness and infighting from the wp community.
I mean, I already feel terrible that I didn’t post about last month’s flamewars on whether or not the upgrade instructions should tell people to delete their old files. (Yes. Really.) And that I didn’t devote any space to the deeply pointy-headed ‘do we really need six different types of RSS feed?’ debate. And that I have so far refrained from mentioning the restlessness already in evidence at the theme competition site because it displays no visible signs of planning or organisation. Or the pettiness of ousted Template Contest Guy refusing to link to his successor. Or the people who’ve forked wordpress to make it properly multibloggy and are subject to snide comments from Matt about how long it took.
What you see here is only the tip of the great shiny iceberg that is wordpress wank, for I am willing to bet there is more, much more, that I haven’t even heard about.
another day on the .org forums
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/63115/, digested for those of us who just don’t have the time:
Guy: When are we getting a patch for the security hole?
Mod: What security hole? There is no security hole. People who say there is are lying.
Guy: Bugtraq doesn’t lie.
Mod: OK, hang on a minute, I’ll tell the devs, seeing as how none of them ever actually hang out here.
Fanboy: There is no security hole. People who say there is are lying.
Guy: Oh look! I can see the entire contents of your plugins directory.
Fanboy: Big deal, I tell everyone what plugins I use anyway.
Guy: You probably shouldn’t do that.
Fanboy: Bullshit!
Fanboy2: Who cares what these security guys say anyway? Their spelling is really bad.
Fanboy3: There is no security hole. People who say there is are lying.
Fanboy4: Haha, this thread is really funny.
Fanboy5: Shut up everyone and just give us a patch!
Mod: What for? There is no security hole. People who say there is are lying.
and so on. ad infinitum.
i have switched to almost spring for a REASON
It’s March. Why is this still at the bottom of my admin pages?
OK, so yesterday it snowed here. And it may well snow today. I don’t care. It’s March. If we have to rip off Google and do the cutesy seasonal logo thing, can we at least get the seasons right?
(Count yourself lucky I’m not from the southern hemisphere. I’d really be annoyed at having to look at snowflakes all friggin’ summer.)
