wordpress™ wank

Using WordPress in Your Domain Name? Don’t! trumpets Lorelle to whoever may actually be reading the Dashboard. Only seven months late to the story. Impressive.

But, returning to that hoary old post and its unwieldy comment thread, I was reminded of the comment by Christine defending her right to use the word however she pleases:

I’ll “google it” or I’ll “Tivo it” or I’ll “blog it” all I want, thank you very much. And if I want to “WordPress it” (which just sounds silly), then I will. *sigh*

Now, I don’t remember whether I mentioned this at the time — probably not, the thread was already pretty old by then — but it just so happens that Christine was the original inventor of the WordPress name, back when it was just another b2 fork. Naturally, this has been airbrushed from WP history; you’ll no longer find any mention of her on wordpress.org, but you can’t hide from archive.org. I’m sure she never dreamt that one day businessmen would be sending out cease and desist letters on behalf of the company that now owns the trademark, because it’s no longer a name invented by one blogger and given freely to another, but a commercial asset that needs to be guarded carefully.

I think getting angry about this sort of thing is naïve, and being an uncritical fanboy about it is naïve, and there is a melancholy inevitability to selling out which is not unpleasing. So I think I’ll just repeat what she said. Sigh.

Domain mapping is here, only a year after it was first promised in the FAQ. (A year and a day, actually, but let’s not be too pedantic.) Let us hope the shopping cart is up to the job.

I personally would caution against registering a domain here unless you’re happy for your domain to be locked into wordpress.com indefinitely (there are apparently plans to allow transfers to other registrars so you can reuse the domain for a self-hosted blog, but no timeline on this) or for your real name and address to be publically associated with your blog (no private registrations as yet; yeah, you could always lie, but that’s technically illegal so I’m not going to go around advocating that solution in public ;)). But people want it, it sounds like it’ll get more takeup than custom CSS and therefore earn more money, and more money means less likelihood of ads getting plastered over the blogs of people who don’t want them. So this is good.

Since the official wp.org plugin list is derived from wp-plugins.org, I’m assuming the official wp.org theme download list is pulled from the largely defunct (because unusable by anyone allergic to command lines) wp-themes.org repository?

And I’m assuming — no, scratch that, I’m reading — that all these themes must be GPL or GPL-compatible?

How in that case do we explain the presence of #15, ‘Girls Suck’, which contains this image?

That’s from explodingdog, of course. Which states the following in its FAQ:

can i use you art on my site?
if it is a noncommercial or personal site, i probably will not mind. but please give me credit and a link. credit: “sam brown, explodingdog“

Attribution. Non-commercial. Doesn’t sound GPL-compatible to me.

So… either wordpress.org is condoning the relicensing of third-party non-GPL content as GPL (is that even legal? it sure doesn’t sound it). Or the theme obeys and reinforces the licensing terms of the creative artwork it is based upon, which means it is not GPL-compatible, and should not be there.

Either way, it is a mess; and it is probably just as well that the majority of theme designers are too dim to master SVN, because they sure as hell haven’t got to grips with the GPL.

Also, can somebody see about fixing themes.wordpress.net up with some kind of autoresponder; or, failing that, some kind of volunteer staff; or, failing that, shutting down registration until the system can actually cope? It won’t help the inbox situation to keep getting hit with repeat emails from people assuming that their upload requests can’t have been received because they submitted them weeks ago and have heard nothing since . And their questions on the blog inevitably get ignored because theundersigned is more interested in pimping his kewl new market research poll than keeping them informed, or indeed letting people in to fix their own themes.

Not that I’m bitter or anything. I mean, the wordpress community will survive just fine without a widgetised version of my ancient centred-fixed-width-1.5-era effort. But what if I’d found a major bug? I have to hang around indefinitely begging for access to my own theme while people keep downloading the faulty version? I see why everyone has to be rubberstamped, and I see why it takes time; but I don’t see how ignoring them will help the site in the long run.

According to my Gmail archives, since I started having trouble with Akismet I have had at least another 140 spam comments slip past. (This isn’t counting the notification emails I’ve deleted, which is about the same amount again.)

Fortunately, I exhumed an old comment words list (originally based on this), which is kicking them all to moderation because these are really obvious spams, signed by strings that would make decent passwords and including URLs with ‘casino’ and ‘adult-strip-poker’ in them. That kind of obvious.

That’s what worries me about it, actually. It’s clearly not a question of Akismet needing to learn that this is spam, because I’m sure I’m not the only one getting these comments and informing it that they are junk. And it’s not a question of the spam words getting in the way of Akismet doing its job; it’s still blocking spam, it’s just not blocking all of it, and if the option interfered with Akismet it wouldn’t be here. If my ancient little list of Bad Words can net these, they shouldn’t be presenting any difficulties for the infinitely more sophisticated Akismet.

So I don’t think these comments ever got to Akismet in the first place. I think there were too many thousand spams in front of them in the queue (including, let’s not forget, those sent by corporate clients who get priority and have exponentially more spam than the rest of us), and that my little casino reviews got bounced right back to me and into moderation.

It’s been a very long time since I was able to rely on any one spam plugin, and it’s a tribute to Akismet that it did the job for so long, but the cracks are beginning to show. Unless it’s just me. I hope it’s just me. Most wordpress.com users don’t have little lists to fall back on.

K2 gets added to wordpress.com. Yeah, another big blue header. Can’t you tell from here how thrilled I am at this exciting new innovation?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t K2 supposed to be all about trendy AJAX crap the code? The livesearch? The live comments? The silly little slidey thing at the top of the page? Which of course means it’s fundamentally incompatible with wordpress.com, and so when we told the fanboys on the forum it might get installed ‘when it’s out of beta’, this meant ‘never’. And I’m sure the type of people who squee over K2 are perfectly aware that ‘when it’s out of beta’ is, nowadays, a synonym for ‘never’, so everyone was happy. Well, ok, the fanboys weren’t happy because they were being denied their silly little slidey thing, but at least they knew where they were.

And now they go and add this ‘K2-lite’ travesty which, far as I can see (I just enabled it) is basically your standard widgetised custom-headered wp.com themes with no extra bells and whistles that I can see. I am baffled. Wouldn’t uploading one of the multiple K2-esque stylesheets for Sandbox have been easier than dumbing down the original theme? Is Kubrick Guy really that annoyed about the possibility of losing his default crown that he would have denied permission? Could he even do that, seeing as how it’s GPL and he has no rights?

What with Unsleepable being given the same treatment (theme butchered, existing stylesheet ignored) and still no work on the Sandbox SVN branch, it begins to look as if Sandbox is deliberately being sidelined. Boo.

Lorelle launches a ‘wordpress treasure hunt’ so that all her adoring fans will link to her will provide us with a directory of wondrous WP articles to rival Codex in their scope and informativeness. Hurray!

[scrolls down unfeasibly long list]

What have we here at #39?

Hmm, I am unfamiliar with this topic. How am I to ‘describe, answer, and provide a solution’ to it? Or, rather, find somebody else who has? I know! Google is my friend!

Well, whaddaya know. Five hits, and four of them are Lorelle. Guess I don’t have too much choice here.

But wait! What is this I see at the bottom of the page?

Well, no. Lorelle sent me in search of ‘jaquinth’. If she meant Mark Jaquith she’d have said so. The guy’s in her blogroll, after all:

And — whaddaya know — there’s a distinct shortage of Lorelle in that set of results.

As has been pointed out here before, misspellings are a very good way of getting hits from people who cannot spell. And if you can provide them with the misspelling rather than trust to their ignorance, so much the better.

Why does this matter? It doesn’t, really, of course. It’s mildly disheartening to see such practices on a blog that’s syndicated across the dashboard of everyone who hasn’t figured out how to switch it off yet; especially when one of the ‘rules’ of this little contest is that other bloggers aren’t allowed to use it to pimp their own articles. It’s also mildly disturbing that she wants articles describing, answering, and providing a solution to such luminaries as ‘boren’, ‘donncha’ and ‘matt’. I wasn’t aware that they were problems. (Well, ok, we do get the occasional malcontent around here who thinks ‘matt’ is a problem, but they generally stop short of advocating solutions.) And no ‘podz’? Even though he’s an Automattic employee and has how-to guides coming out of his ears? That wouldn’t be political at all, would it?

Fortunately, it seems nobody else has scrolled down as far as #39 yet; and if they have, they very sensibly appear to have better things to do than pursue the matter; since, as pointed out in the comments, doing this ‘challenge’ halfway thoroughly would take at least seventeen hours. Not even I have that sort of time.

Nonetheless, if you do, you may consider this post as describing, answering and providing a solution to ‘39. jaquinth’, and tick it off your list. If the Google gods are merciful, I may even steal the number one slot.