wordpress™ wank

Today, apparently, security holes are like Angelina Jolie having a baby.

Well, I’m not sure Ms. Jolie gets caught sniffing round Third World orphanages on a monthly basis quite yet, but it’s getting that way.

I’m past caring about exploits, I really am. I like to think that no script kiddie is going to attack my installs when all they have to do is google a vulnerable version and find some schmuck’s footer telling the world they’re still using 2.0. Seriously, who are these people who think shoving the release number in metatags is a good idea? It doesn’t get you traffic. It doesn’t help you when you’re trotting off to the forums with a problem (you can see it in the admin footer anyway, duh). If your readers care what version you’re using, then you need to think about why your writing is failing so miserably to hold their attention. The only people with any interest in this information are those who want to hack your blog. And you’re not even helping them out because they’ll get so much more of a buzz out of it if you make it slightly less easy for them.

(There is also much sly kicking of baby squirrels at said link, if you’re into that sort of thing. I await the inevitable ‘but we ARE open source now!’ protests in the comments.)

Feed stats are no more. Boo hoo.

I don’t know which is worse, the mixed-metaphor-fest that is the post itself (feed stats were elderly fried teenage roses? yeah, often thought the same thing myself) or the closing of comments after only 200 of them. You can’t handle 200 ‘we don’t dig this’ comments? Poor flower. I can’t imagine the kind of nightmares news.livejournal.com/ would give you:

Let’s just hope you never get any truly passionate users, eh?

Anyway, people are much more upset about this than they were about Snap Preview. My feeling is that this is because the target audience for this place is new enough to blogging to be impressed by silly little popup windows and obsessed with stats. Stats are hugely important to newbies. They would rather have you conjure up some numbers out of thin air telling them they are read and loved, than hang around waiting for true and accurate figures which will probably tell them that they are not.

Unlike Snap Preview or ads, the presence of useless feed stats didn’t bother those who weren’t interested in them, but their removal was guaranteed to upset those who were. Bad misjudgement of your demographic. I hope this doesn’t become a habit.

Apparently, Matt has been spouting off to the Greek media about his intentions to allow wordpress.com users to place Google Adsense units on their blogs. Way to go to undermine the forum volunteers telling people on a daily basis how adsense is not allowed for security reasons and any ads will get your blog taken down without notice etc. etc. etc.

You know, a major part of the recent livejournal user uproar was because Six Apart’s CEO thought it was more important to chat to CNET about policy changes than informing the actual users what was going down. Doesn’t anybody at Automattic pay any attention to what’s going on outside their little bubble?

I’m hoping this’ll be as successful as last year’s Style Contest, and that Automattic will be as generous with their support as Six Apart were with theirs. (Matt has already thrown in $500 prize money, which is a good start, but a little linkage wouldn’t hurt.) I’m not worried about the two-month deadline from a design point of view, but it may be a little short notice to get top-quality judges and sponsors in place. Judging and adminstrating these things is a lot of work.

Potentially, this could be a real boost to takeup of the custom CSS option on wordpress.com, which so far has been mostly limited to people already proficient in CSS and those who know enough to make minor tweaks to a theme they’re otherwise happy with. There’s no intrinsic reason why this should be so. After all, not everyone who installs a wordpress theme is familiar with XHTML and PHP.

The GPL requirement does limit what we can use to create our styles (no stock photography, icons, brushes etc.) and I don’t see the necessity for it since, as adam points out, not even the most rabid free beer fundamentalists can seriously argue that CSS for WP needs to be GPL. If I’m not allowed to touch PHP I can’t insert the required links anyway, though, so this is pretty much moot. Anyway, it’s more of a challenge having to make everything from scratch. Time to dig out the camera again.

(x-posted to ntu @ wordpress.com)