wordpress™ wank

The LJ-ification of wordpress.com continues apace. Well, icons are pretty much the main thing that gets people to pay for LJ, and I’m sure multiple avatars will be a paid upgrade at some stage. I am happy, meanwhile, because I get to use the ancient wordpress wank icon I never actually used on LJ.

Actually, I made two wordpress wank icons, but the other one didn’t scale as well:

(The text is a misquote from Shelley Powers:

Additionally, you talk about the WordPress community, but you don’t treat it as a community. You treat it as Matt and the Backup Singers.

which I loved sufficiently to iconise, if not quite enough to actually use the icon.)

This is me biting my lip and restricting snark to the use of italics.

No expression of surprise that the OP is apparently using a nightly build. No wondering why Dreamhost had left the wordpress import feature out of my 2.0.4 one-click install. No pointing out that the news post linked to in timethief’s reply says that it isn’t in 2.0. No doubting what the purpose might be of a series of posts which just say ‘the previous answer is exactly right’ without adding anything useful. Hijacking the thread with snark rather than answering the question wouldn’t help anyone either.

But if I didn’t say anything anywhere, I think my lip would start to bleed.

vkaryl snipes at Matt on the .org forums as the backup plugin permissions wank rears its inelegant head again.

(This was the piece of wank where the support volunteers did not want wp-content left wide open, and the plugin’s original author did not want wp-content left wide open, so naturally it was left wide open, because that is how wordpress democracy works.)

Matt takes advantage of Podz’s absence to call for her head on a plate, which doesn’t generate massive amounts of sympathy from the wp-forums list because, you know, she’s one of them, and spends a hell of a lot more time on the list and on the forums than Matt does. The .org forums have always been a bear pit, and the mods and developers are as rude and dismissive as everyone else; more so, if anything. I have been saying for a very long time that this gives a terrible impression of the community, but apparently it is only an issue when people start saying nasty things about the Great Leader. Sigh.

• Related Posts .com dashboard cruft was launched, was rubbish, was swiftly rebranded as Tag Surfer, which successfully promises nothing at all but sounds vaguely trendy. I say ‘vaguely’ because while ‘Tag’ is bang-on 2006, ‘Surfer’ sounds more 1997.
• Khaled got a little pissed off by Shuttle being passed on to Bryan Veloso with instructions to start again from the ground up when the team had already done all the necessary research: ‘Why are we reinventing the wheel, when we’ve already designed the car?’ And by the fact that all that has been implemented so far is… um, lots of blue. (And Kubrick Guy’s login page. Ouch.)

  Whereupon Matt does the usual bewildered ‘why didn’t you contact me privately rather than bitch about me to the world at large?’ routine. There is something ironic about the developer of a medium for bitching about stuff to the world at large using comments to bitch at people in public about their failure to confine their bitching to private, but I cannot quite put my finger on what it is.

• Linkbacks are eeeeeevil unless they are to the developers, part 2892793. I think perhaps if the wordpress developers had been more sympathetic to theme designers’ desire to be credited I would now be more sympathetic to theirs.

  That said, I always credit WP on free templates (though I do use nofollow, for reasons which are readily guessable to anyone with a knowledge of wordpress history). The ancient forum thread which inspired me to remove the link from my personal journal has vanished, naturally, but it had to do with Root jumping on people for not leaving the credit link on their blogs and Matt then saying credit links were unnecessary and contrary to the GPL. This probably had more to do with Root being Root than anything else; but I did think (quote from old LJ entry, must get around to importing this stuff): ‘fine, if they don’t want any credit I’m not clogging up my sidebar with it anymore.’

  I am surprised that WordPress apparently has no other means of promotion:

  

  but then of course advertising and promotion are completely different things.

1. k2-ified version of sandbox
2. another k2-ified version of sandbox
3. guess what this is. go on. guess.

I only have to mention it’s going to be the next default and they start springing up like mushrooms. I am starting to scare myself.

I wonder what implications the official suggestion we all switch development to Sandbox has for theundersigned’s competition, seeing as how that was going to discriminate against themes based on existing themes?

Woo, the mailing list archives are finally working again. I have a lot of catching up to do.

OK, well, first off, Sandbox appears to be the new k2. I’m not going to say the new Kubrick because Hemingway is the new Kubrick; right now it’s so hip it hurts but in two years time it’s going to look horrendously dated. Where was I? Oh yes, the Word of Matt:

I would suggest anyone developing a new theme try to build it on top of Sandbox. If it doesn’t work, share why.

I find it completely frickin’ hilarious how everyone on wp-hackers is hating on Kubrick now because it’s hard to customise. Like this was not pointed out by multiple people pre-1.5, and Matt had not ignored it because he was blinded by his love for the kewl rounded corners. And now that everyone is sick to the back teeth of the kewl rounded corners he wants to go back to the Zen Garden model, where we have the same XHTML for everything and just twiddle with the CSS. Which is fine by me, since Sandbox is a much better structure to build on than Classic (or for that matter Kubrick) ever was, but why did we have to have this ridiculous diversion just to get back to the same place as we were with 1.2 ?

Further Word of Matt on the changing of the default template:

It’s not really worth discussing the aesthetics of it because we’ll never all agree, it’s just going to be something I’ll make a call on.

Truer word was never spoken: though as his previous calls have included Georgia in the admin pages, nasty footer-free Classic, borgified Kubrick, some frankly icky stuff on wp.com (Sweet Blossoms, anyone?) and his own egg-yolk yellow blog, this does concern me slightly.

For 2.5 I predict a k2-ified Sandbox, by way of throwing Kubrick Guy another conciliatory bone.

I’m guessing that the reason paid features were sneaked in by means of a new unannounced menu option* and a passing comment in the news blog (rather than, you know, an actual post) is so that the big announcement could be made at WordCamp. Which sort of makes sense, because they had to have some sort of news to generate the right kind of triumphalist atmosphere, and ‘we’re stealing LJ’s friends-only feature’ might not have been enough all by itself, what with the plebs having been told about it too.

At first I was thinking $15 compared pretty well with livejournal, but then I remembered all the other stuff I get for $25 over there. Usericons, phoneposts, unlimited customisation, mood themes, polls… granted, I don’t use most of this stuff, which is why I no longer think $25 is worth it and am reverting to free. Having been paying for hosting since 2002, I’m not target market for either of these hosts. The a-la-carte credit system, so that you’re only paying for the extra features you need rather than an entire package, is definitely a good idea. Livejournal users have been wanting that for years. I don’t know whether it will prove less lucrative than pressuring people into fixed-tariff subscriptions, or whether some kind of ‘pile your virtual trolley high with cheap add-ons’ mentality will kick in. The latter, probably.

And at first I thought Six Apart might be slightly worried by the introduction of friends-only, but actually no, because privacy is only half of the rationale behind LJ friends (the other half is friends page aggregation), and having extra blogs rather than filters, while useful for inflating the total number of blogs, is significantly more awkward for end users. It’s more like password-protection on diaryland or the late lamented diary-x than what LJ or Vox are doing, and none the worse for that. After all, if I need LJ’s privacy features, I’m going to be on LJ.

I like the idea of Sandbox (I haven’t looked at the structure yet, but I’m assuming it’ll be reasonably sound), though when I mooted a very basic theme in the forum I was thinking more of controlling selected features through the options menu. It doesn’t sound as if it has that, so until the community gets around to coding copy-and-paste stylesheets, this is really only useful to those who are already comfortable with CSS.

Question: is this the same Minimalist Sandbox as on Scott’s site, or are there wordpress.com-specific changes?

* which appears, by the way, to have replaced import/export, now squirrelled away under ‘manage’. I am so looking forward to dealing with the confusion arising from this in the forums while the staff party.