wordpressâ„¢ wank

Today, we are mostly getting request timeouts and ’server maintenance’ pages, and half the time the forums aren’t accessible either. Joy. I’m starting to understand why we don’t have an export feature; it’s not to make Six Apart look good, it’s because if they hadn’t locked us in there’d be nobody left.

I made two related points on the .com forums yesterday: one, that we need a status page like what everyone else has. Except that there’s no point because no-one would ever bother to update it. (Have I posted this before? Wouldn’t surprise me if I had, given its obviousness.)

And two: when the traffic got too much and the servers started going wonky and it became evident we needed new ones, why not shut down sign-ups temporarily? Or reinstate the invite system? Prospective users might get annoyed; but they’re also likely to be reassured that you’re looking after the users you already have and ensuring that their service isn’t compromised. Right now, my service feels pretty compromised. And while it probably wouldn’t make a vast amount of difference whether new accounts were being made or not, it would look as if the developers were doing something about the situation now, rather than just saying ‘yeah, we’re getting new hardware, w0ot!’

Except oh, I forgot, you can’t close signups because then your standalone wordpress users wouldn’t be able to get hold of their Akismet key, and there is no mechanism for giving them an Akismet key without the useless spacewasting usernamehogging free blog to go with it. Consequently there is no way of ensuring the service grows at a sensible, sustainable rate. You can’t shut the doors at the entrance. And you won’t open them at the exit.

[slaps 'idiocy' tag on entry]

Well, after being down for some value of a few minutes, we are restored, and thanks to the generosity of the VCs it’s of course never ever going to happen ever again. Until next time. There is no such thing as 100% uptime, after all, even beyond the Land of Free. And shifting to shiny new servers and datacenters, while necessary for long-term stability, generally also entails short-term wonkiness.

Yes. I am the quintessence of glass-half-empty.

Also, I don’t think it’s fair to bitch at people for failing to make RSS backups (it inconveniences your subscribers and it’s far from an ideal format). Or to say that we have a backup plugin when we don’t. Or to shout at people when they say their blogs have gone forever. They only have your word for it about the backups. Why should they trust you? They might be refugees from diary-x.

So, on the one hand, I think that you really can’t expect any better from a free host and it’s up to you to take responsibility for your own data; and on the other, I have intense sympathy for people who perhaps aren’t savvy enough to work around the absence of a big BACKUP link, and then log on one day to find all their posts have vanished. Nobody knows in that first moment that it’s only temporary, or that they’re not the only one. The big BACKUP button might not be technically necessary, but psychologically it has real value. It cushions people against the fear that everything’s gone. It gives them back their content. It says you love them enough to set them free. It says you have enough faith in your product to believe they’ll stick around even if the door’s open for them to leave. Confidence inspires confidence. Saying ‘trust us’ at the precise moment the blogs have disappeared? Not so much.

Sometimes I think the reason we don’t have proper export is to give Movable Type something to feel superior about besides multiblogs. I can’t think of any other explanation.

Here are the guys on the mu forums getting all excited about the prospect of getting their little coder hands on ‘all of the code behind WP.com’ (direct quote) and then I have to go and ruin things by actually asking about it and getting told a) this is already happening, except b) it’s kind of not exactly:

It’s not line-for-line WordPress.com, as some things aren’t or can’t be easily genericized for release, like our stats system, but the codebase is synced up pretty regularly.

I feel like such a party pooper.

Of course, as Matt reminded them months ago, even under the GPL Automattic have no obligation to release all the code, and it would make zero commercial sense to do so. All these other guys should just get together and fork their own. Or learn Perl and set up lj clones.

(And yes, I was going to check out how many changes have been made to mu since wordpress.com came online, but sadly trac.mu.wordpress.org has gone missing and has apparently been gone for a few days now. Shall I go ask about it in wp-hackers and see how many whimsical reflections on the nature of time I get?)

Recently, I made the decision to sell a minority stake in the company to a few select partners who I think are going to bring a lot of value to the business far beyond mere dollars.

few points:

• Choice of pronouns says so much.
• Exactly what value are these anonymous donors going to bring other than cash? BBQ? Pizza? OK, that’s mean. Sucking up to the investors is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Similarly, I’m not going to go around demanding names and credentials. People should be able to invest in start-ups without having their privacy invaded.
• I’m sure the timing of this announcement and the discussion we’ve been having about funding and transparency over on the .com forums are wholly unrelated, but it’s worth reading anyway. I’d actually forgotten about the Yahoo! deal and the referrer income from the other hosts until drmike mentioned it.
• My recent wild speculations on the imminence of paid services are equally unconnected; let’s just say that being accountable to a couple of VCs has to be preferable to taking money from unruly and demanding users and leave it at that.
• Hiring Podz is a deeply sensible decision, but I still reckon he needs a PR person to make posts to the dead blog, firefight when things go wrong and avoid cases of Freudian pronoun slippage. would be ideal, if she could be persuaded to keep dead blog posts to two paragraphs or less.

Donncha’s wordpress.com blog is now forwarding to ‘blog.donncha.net’, but the blue navbar makes clear that we’re still in .com land. From this, we may safely surmise that domain forwarding (a paid feature, natch) is not far away.

I daresay they’ll want to smooth out most of the glitches introduced by the latest ‘upgrade’ before announcing paid services, but it won’t be too long now.

We thought it was fixed, but actually they were just busy breaking things a bit more. Good one guys, you had a couple of people thinking you were listening to them there.

Can you get us the hell off this buggy alpha code and let us keep our link categories for our links thank you please? If I wanted a post category called ‘Blogroll’ I’d have made one myself. But I didn’t. Because I’m not on crack.

Also, if someone could explain what the point is in renaming our links ‘bookmarks’, I’d be grateful. Currently I have a horrible suspicion it is because it sounds kind of del.icio.us-ish and firefoxy and generally 2.0, and to my mind that does not constitute a good enough reason for confusing your users involuntary beta testers.

And now the .com forums appear to be down.

Probably better not to ask.

Guy asks where the mu.wordpress.org forums are gone, gets ’smug and sarcastic useles[s]ness’ rather than a straight answer, and is finally baffled by why Matt couldn’t just tell him that the forums were actually back.

We are now, I think, some way past the point at which wp-hackers made sense, if indeed it ever did.

I find it abhorrent that this supposed “Press Release� was not only on the wordpress development blog but continues to display in every WordPress user’s dashboard as if it were fact. On top of that, when you try to go to wordpress support to confirm that it is indeed an april fool’s joke, you’ll get the equally unprofessional error message of, “WordPress.org is taking a lunch break.� (the entire site is down).

Anyone else find this to be in rather poor taste?

If anyone ever catches me using the word ‘abhorrent’ in relation to blog software, they have my official permission to slap me around the head and advise me to get a sense of proportion. That is all.