wordpress™ wank

No, I’m not going to bitch about the Snap previews. Covered that. As did Lorelle, albeit at greater length and with compelling arguments about accessibility and stuff. No, I have fresh stupidity for you.

Here am I, planning to take advantage of the post-Christmas sales and get cut-price custom CSS for the custom CSS blog. I log in, all geared up to place my order before the deadline, and this is what I see:

OK, so I still have to spend $15, and I can’t even get anything for my remaining 5 credits?

Somebody really needs to explain the concept of a ’sale’ to these guys. Let me start. It generally means ‘paying less than you otherwise would’. And please do not try to fob me off with ‘there may be $5 upgrades available in the future’ or ‘you can give the remaining credits to someone else’. If I want something that currently costs $10 I do not normally have to pay more than $10. If I were in a shop and I handed over £20 for a £15 pound item and they kept the change saying ‘oh, but we might have something for a fiver later that you might want’, I wouldn’t be best pleased.

And, naturally, I can’t even send a feedback asking whether they’d be prepared to give me my change. Somebody also needs to explain the concept of ‘not launching new features when support is on holiday’, but then we are dealing with the people who thought that a major new release was the perfect time to break redesign the .org forums, so it’s not like this is surprising or anything.

Adam continues picking up the Christmas slack with news of yet another dodgy wordpress.com theme.

Are there really so few decent themes out there that we have to go grubbing around adfarms and credit card sites and other people’s OS projects for them? Yes, there’s some content on that ‘amazing-christmas-ideas’ site, but the stress the theme page puts upon it being ‘a very SE-friendly design’ and ‘ideal for anyone that owns a blog or niche site about Christmas ‘ leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth. I hadn’t even heard of ‘niche’ sites before that wordpresstutorials.com story introduced me to the wonderful world of affiliate marketing. Sure enough, the other theme he’s offering is billed as:

…an excellent theme for anyone that wants to decorate their WordPress site for the Holiday season and perfect for business blogs or affiliate marketers blogging about Christmas gift ideas.

There is a distinction, it seems to me, between theme designers accepting sponsorship, and themes which are made or commissioned for the primary purpose of getting your link onto multiple blogs. I think Scott or theundersigned would have released their sponsored themes, sooner or later, regardless of whether a third party bought links on them. They’re theme designers. Making themes is what they do. But I don’t believe this guy would have bothered with a Christmas theme if there wasn’t any pagerank to be gained from the venture. He makes it very clear in the readme that you’re not allowed to tamper with his precious link:

but you must leave the credit in the footer intact with the link active and unaltered in any version of this template you create.

He really means that, you know. No no-following. That would make the whole thing worthless.

I have nothing against CC-Attribution licences, you understand. I’ve used them myself. The difference is that it genuinely wouldn’t bother me if people decided to slap a no-follow on the link. The link’s there because I spent time, effort and skill on this thing, so I’d kind of prefer it if people made it clear that I made it rather than them. I don’t even know what the PR on my long-neglected template site is these days. I didn’t make the templates to get traffic to my site. I built the site to distribute the templates. As I say, there is a distinction.

You know how you can tell a site that’s releasing themes for pagerank and advertising purposes? It isn’t a personal blog or a template site. That’s how.

I really don’t understand why Matt went to the trouble of negotiating the right to remove the link only to hand the guy all that lovely free wordpress.com pagerank and traffic anyway. Now every affiliate marketer and niche blogger and his dog are going to think that they can get a piece of the pie, and start throwing together gardening layouts! and food! and weddings! and travel! and debt consolidation! (I wonder what a debt consolidation theme would look like? Like it was designed by the dog, probably.) And even if they don’t get their links onto wordpress.com, they’ll get enough bites from .org users to make it worth their while.

So, let’s recap: if you’re a theme designer looking to cover your hosting and development costs and you accept a sponsored link from Flower Delivery Guy, this is BAD and your theme is banned from wordpress.com for evermore. However, if you are Flower Delivery Guy looking to increase your advertising revenue and you’re hosting the theme on your own site, this is fine and wordpress.com will be happy to give you all the linklove you can dream of.

I’m starting to think Matt just doesn’t like designers. It would explain a lot.

It sounds like the Sandbox dream is dead. By the time we get to 2.2 (spring 2008, probably) Sandbox will emphatically not be ‘new’ (though I also think we could stand to lose Matt’s beloved Kubrick by that point).

I hope the flower delivery guy is proud of himself.

Anyone want to take bets on the eventual choice being some bastardized version of Canvas with Garland’s customisable colours, stripped of its CC licence and credited to Automattic on the grounds of being based on the widget code? Because, you know, even k2 will be looking tired by then.

oh, go on then, since it’s Christmas:

Five things you don’t know about me

1. From the age of 12 to 21, I had an active antipathy towards computers (blame school IT lessons). I refused to activate my college email account and wrote all my essays on a Sharp Font Writer.
2. My other unhealthy fascinations include reality tv. I had a Big Brother fan blog for series 2, 3 and 4.
3. I won an iPod Mini from Walkers Crisps by texting them at five past one in the morning
4. I once travelled to Wisconsin to present a conference paper on Victorian nursery rhymes.
5. The only things I can cook are pasta, risotto, and apple crumble

Introduce something in March and it’s a great new feature, remove it in December and it’s another great new feature.

This has endless scope:

‘We got rid of the cluttered old front page with its random plugging of Matt and Friends and made it easier to read and faster to load!’

‘Remember the clunky rich text editor? Well, it’s been replaced by a much more intuitive editor featuring quicktags! Enjoy!’

‘We’ve replaced those silly widgets with a standard layout so that every blog you visit is guaranteed to have the same sidebar. No more confusion as you look in vain for the blogroll!’

‘We know that a lot of you have been requesting Google Adsense on your blogs, and we’ve been listening! From now on all wordpress.com blogs will feature a classy 468×60 ad banner directly below the header!’

Like I say. Endless scope.

I take a couple of days off to go Christmas shopping and watch Happy Feet, and when I come back Adam is filling in for me, by chronicling the Garland affair in more detail than I could have probably have mustered. This is great. I would not want you to be deprived of wordpress wank because I had temporarily prioritised dancing baby penguins.

I’m afraid I don’t have vast amounts of sympathy for drupal here. If your new design is really important to you, you should keep it under wraps until it’s ready to unleash on the world, because if it’s as great as you think it is (or even if it’s not) then people will steal it. I love how a piqued Matt is now dissing said theme and implying it isn’t all that:

the adoption numbers for the theme haven’t been as high as I expected. People who like it like it but I think it’s missing some key elements to make it a popular theme.

Hmm, maybe the missing element is originality? I suspect that if the screenshot used red instead of blue it would be attracting more attention from casual users who look at screenshots rather than blurbs and already have a dozen other big blue headers to pick from. Or maybe it’s because the port is yet another of those rush jobs that leaves out most of the functionality? (see also k2 ‘lite’, unsleepable, or basically anything more advanced than your standard ‘two-columns and a big blue header’ job.)

Also, this?

Tacky. Just tacky. If I’m porting a theme the original designer always gets the credit. They’re the designer. I’m just the technician who did the tedious job of messing with the code. Yes, that is in some cases almost as arduous as making the thing from scratch, and the coder does need to be mentioned so that bugs and support questions relating to the port get to the right place. But it’s like I was saying when Bryan got the boot: designing original stuff and porting someone else’s original stuff are not the same thing. The difference between coders and designers is that coders don’t understand this even when it’s explained to them multiple times, whereas designers don’t need to be told.

As if it wasn’t tacky enough allowing autoplaying YouTube clips, wordpress.com bloggers now have the option to inflict autoplaying mp3s upon us. Thanks a bunch.

You just know that if this were a livejournal news post there would have been 1087 comments along the lines of ‘please stop turning into MySpace’. whereas here we get 96 saying ’sweet! can we have Coldplay?’ This may be because most of the people on livejournal have been on the internet long enough to have seen this crap the first time round. Just because we are now sufficiently technologically advanced to have background mp3s rather than background midis doesn’t make the concept any less sucky.

As a matter of interest, Sonific have at least two blogs on here showcasing their widgets. From their FAQ:

How does Sonific make money?
Among other things, Sonific makes money by offering targeted and strictly contextual advertising (i.e. by offering ads that are related to the music that is being presented), and by collecting commissions from e-commerce transactions that happen after people click on the SongSpots™ and buy the song, CD, concert ticket, music player or subscription service.

Somebody needs to explain to me how setting up multiple blogs with your own profit-generating widgets is different from displaying affiliate ads. Because images in the sidebar which takes you to a page where you can buy the product look a hell of a lot like an ad to me, with the sole difference that the commission goes to Sonific rather than the blog owner. So does that mean I’m OK to host ads now, as long as the person profiting from them isn’t me?

Either way, I’ve reported them as spam. We’ll see what happens.

Wow, they didn’t waste much time whipping Bryan off the staff page did they? Clearly, adding Lloyd (how many months has it been now? two and a bit? surely he can’t still be hiding from his former Flock overlords?), not to mention Matt 2 and Markifying Podz were lesser priorities. As apparently was adding up how many staff they have. The blurb with the links that lead nowhere says eleven, I counted nine profiles, and one of those is somebody whose appointment was never announced anywhere, so maybe she’s as illusory an employee as Jonas Luster. (Remember Jonas Luster? The guy who got stuck with the firefighting during Spamgate? He stopped even using wordpress after that, as I recall.) Personally I wouldn’t have thought that appointing a woman was something to be ashamed of, but then you never know how the fanboys are going to react to such shocking revelations as ‘women exist, and some of them can even code’.

Oh, and the Automattic site’s been redesigned. That was fast as well. It’s not quite finished yet (see my reference to broken links) and it looks less professional than it used to:

but presumably this is all part of establishing a coherent brand identity across all of their sites. I expect Akismet to be redone in blue, black and grey with serious overuse of big bold fonts shortly.

Via engtech, the news that Bryan Veloso is no longer with Automattic.

I don’t know how much this has to do with the appointment some weeks back of Matt Thomas, designer of wordpress.org. (wordpress.org was designed? oh yeah, now I remember, it coincided with a major release and the forums breaking). Bryan clearly feels he was second choice, which is probably correct. I don’t think Matt has much use for a designer, as such. He wants someone to code up other people’s ideas, whether they’re the Shuttle team’s or his own, and adapt other people’s themes for wordpress.com. This requires a fair degree of technical skill, but it ain’t designing. In retrospect, it’s only surprising that Bryan agreed to take it on.

The way I work just didn’t fit with their expectations. I could get into how the expectations for designers and programmers differ, or how using Trac to measure output might not be the best way to track my progress.

How many years have I been saying now that the developers don’t understand design or the needs of designers? It was one of the first things that struck me about wordpress, it’s never changed and sounds like it never will. I’m hoping for his sake that Matt 2 doesn’t have any high-flown ideas about creativity and autonomy, but he’s probably been working with wordpress long enough for that not to be a danger.

Gee, a new green and blue theme. That will provide a great alternative to the existing blue, green, black, gray and occasional-maroon-or-orange-accent themes. Somebody needs to get you guys a color wheel and cover the “cool” part of it with masking tape.

Yeah, what they said.

We can buy extra filespace now. I don’t know what they’ve done on the backend, but whatever it was appears to have had the side effect of fixing my thumbnails (which vanished mysteriously last time they messed with the uploader). Yay. Slightly odd that the post doesn’t mention the amount we have already, but at least we no longer have to scour the FAQ for it, or guess how much space we’re using up.

Following a couple of other critical posts on the .com forums, options apparently got temporarily banned. Mark doesn’t believe him. I’m afraid I do.

Also on options’s blog I work out the main reason why it’s so important to fool visitors into heading for the tags pages . It is so simple, I would feel embarrassed to restate it here.