wordpress™ wank

I probably could have written a better comment on this but Matt’s use of the royal ‘we’ never fails to set my teeth on edge, plus the inevitable fanboy fawning was making me feel slightly unwell. What I was driving at is that if sponsored links were ever going to do people real harm in Google (which isn’t proven, by the way; do you know of any blogs that have been downgraded because of sponsored links in their theme? I’m genuinely interested. So far all we know is that Google is penalising people for running Text-Link Ads and participating in blog networks such as b5media.) that would have killed sponsored themes without any intervention from Matt. And we would still have themes.wordpress.net, unless of course Matt managed to find some other excuse to kill it.

If people are gaming the system that’s Google’s problem, and it was always Google’s job to fix it.

I sort of love this comment over at Andy Beard’s post:

Of course, here is the part that drives me bonkers. Little ol soon to be Google Partner (just a rumor) WordPress.com, didn’t get smacked, with all of those subdomains, weirdo linkage, unnatural linking. Hmmmm.

for its wild speculation and usage of the word ‘bonkers’. And because surely wordpress.com is one of the biggest blog networks out there. Of course, wordpress.com is also a big Adsense client, stamps down hard on any other form of advertising or paid linking and has an owner who loses no time in leaping when Google says ‘jump’, so if Google turn a blind eye to their peculiar linking practices it shouldn’t surprise anyone. Google doesn’t need to buy Automattic; it already gets to dictate company policy.

I don’t want this place to go to Yahoo. I really don’t want this place to go to Yahoo. But what if it’s the only way to get Matt out of Google’s pocket?

Um, thanks for updating Sandbox so I can now use my beloved span.meta-nav but if you want people to use it you might want to deminiaturise the code editor:

Weirdly, this doesn’t happen when you get to it through the standard ‘edit CSS’ tab, it’s just when you click on the redundant new link next to the screenshot:

I think my blog is the best place to report this because a) support is generally shut, b) nobody in the forum has backend access and c) it’s a trivial bug caused by clicking on a link that doesn’t need to be there in the first place, and is therefore sort of my own fault.

Also, can somebody with a better grasp of the semantic subtleties explain to me the distinction between ‘minimal’ and ‘minimalist’?

While you’re at it, do you think you could explain why White as Milk isn’t considered ‘minimal’ or ‘minimalist’ even though it actually contains the word ‘minimal’ in the theme description? Where do these random tags even come from? I know Automattic don’t trust the mob but I’m fairly sure they could do a better job than this.

I’ve been told I have to make a post on Gravatar. So, yeah.

I would be surprised if this purchase actually cost Automattic that much. I think Mark’s post says more than he intended it to:

I liked the idea of gravatars when they came out [...] but then for some reason it sort of dropped off the planet for me. No idea why.

That would probably be because it was a fad, like blogshares and blogrings and those little 80×15 buttons. It might have held on to more of its original popularity if it’d had the resources it needed, and it might now get a shot in the arm because Automattic has given it the resources and an army of fanboys willing to give it another chance, but this was a site that had been in decline for a while. If the concept was that great somebody else would have picked it up and run with it by now. It’s nice that wordpress.com users may now be able to use their avatars outside the walled garden, and it’s nice that people outside .com may not have to be represented by little grey men anymore, but that’s about as far as it goes.

(OK, so there’s the ‘wordpress.com becomes major OpenID provider thus hijacking Six Apart’s baby’ angle, but that sort of bores me so I’ll let somebody else pick up on that.)

I’m more interested in the sudden flood of ‘ooh, Automattic must be worth something!’ speculation this has prompted. (Spending money makes you a far better proposition than merely making it, I suppose.) The most compelling of these for me is Should Yahoo buy WordPress?, since I’ve privately thought for a good while now that acquisition by Yahoo! is the ultimate goal. Partly because Automattic’s CEO has already sold one company to them, but also because… well, they’d be wanting a Blogger, and wordpress.com is by some distance the most obvious candidate. I was just waiting for somebody else to say it first, to stave off references to tinfoil.

(Please be aware that any comments denying that Automattic is for sale will be exhumed and mocked mercilessly when the Acquisition comes.)

These days, I find 07refugees over at insanejournal a quicker way of keeping up with livejournal wank than wading through infinite cat macros at news, but this doesn’t stop me occasionally wishing to give the contributors a smack upside the head.

Oh noes! livejournal has sneakily turned on autopay so they can steal your moneys! OK, I want you to imagine this scenario: livejournal says they’re having a sale on paid accounts so they cost $10. When you get to the checkout they have this shady ‘credits’ system that lets you purchase $15 units only. So you buy the credits and — get this — they tell you they’re not giving you the extra $5 back because they ‘don’t do refunds’. That’s what stealing your money looks like. LJ know perfectly well they couldn’t get away with that kind of manoeuvre. Unfortunately, wordpress.com can.

(If I had a personal blog here, I’d have left there and then. As it is, the wank from that incident is worth $5. Also, of course, I’m never buying anything from them again, so ultimately they lost more than they gained.)

Oh noes! livejournal is screening comments on news! You think that’s censorship? Please. I can’t remember the last time I got a comment past the Great Firewall of Matt on our news blog.

Oh noes! livejournal is tracking visitors to your journal! Yeah, except livejournal is only tracking 5% of journals and has given you the option to opt out. Wanna see my footer?

I don’t seem to recall anyone telling me about that, let alone letting me turn it off. Not to mention the Google Analytics shit in the header.


_uacct = “UA-52447-2″;

_udn = “wordpress.com”;
urchinTracker();


Oh noes! livejournal is inflicting snap previews on every link in your journal! Honey, wordpress.com was doing that months ago. And they didn’t even have the grace to make it an opt-in feature for existing users. We had to seek out the option to turn it off ourselves.

Oh noes! our ToS is vague and keeps changing and we don’t know what will get us deleted! and we is being censored from posting porns! Try not having a terms of service sometime. Then maybe try being hidden from all public listings if your content isn’t PG-13. Try blogging on a host where they can delete you without notice for having a link they don’t like the look of. Or a host where they rewrite the FAQ to allow them to requisition your username at any time without your permission. How do you like them apples?

Back on lj… Oh noes! livejournal won’t let me hide its stupid ugly navbar for evermore and never have to look at it again! At least they let you hide the navbar on your own journal. And if you can’t deal with their tasteful, grey, customisable creation then how would you like something fat and blue and Bloggery instead? (I take that back. Blogger also give you a choice of colours, and their blue is less visually offensive.) If I want to take the navbar off my blog that’s a) going to cost me money, because they charge you here to edit your CSS, and b) get my blog deleted.

And oh noes! livejournal reneged on their promise to never ever put ads on the site! Well, at least they told you the policy was changing. And, again, they gave you the option to opt out. We had ads implemented by stealth and they only owned up when a bunch of people informed them that the lack of ads was their favourite feature. Even now, the existence of ads is hidden away in the FAQ and right at the bottom of the ‘features’ page (and we had to lobby quite hard to get that much). Many people remain unaware of them, because Automattic are smart enough to show them only to non-logged-in users. As for opting out, you’d have to give them money. Yes, even if you’re already paying for other upgrades. And that’s an unofficial workaround which I can’t promise wouldn’t get your blog deleted. The official no-ads upgrade is vaporware.

Yes, livejournal gets a lot of stuff wrong, but guess which site I’m willing to trust with my personal blog? (Here’s a clue: the idea of random angst juxtaposed with compulsory ads and ugly navbars is of extremely limited appeal to me.)

Because it’s not even worth trying to post comments on the news blog these days:

The screenshot makes me want to cry. And when I find the demo, I discover it is yet another Kubrick mod that doesn’t even bother changing the stupid little pseudobullets. I thought we got past this phase two years ago, and everyone had realised by now that spending five minutes doing find/replace on hex codes does not constitute good design?

Meanwhile, if you want to use any of the Sandbox style contest entries (you know, like new skins? from this summer?), you need to pay for the CSS upgrade, download the skin yourself, and backport it to 0.61, because in spite of their unimpeachable GPLness none of them meet Automattic’s high standards. (Well, Blueberry made it to SVN. So near, so far.)

Andy Beard wonders how much Automattic made from their deal with answers.com.

I would put his chances of getting an answer on that at round about nil. Though Matt might well pop in and say that answers.com is a great site that many people like to link to . I wouldn’t bet against him mentioning tinfoil hats either.

If I wonder (again) whether wordpress.com’s studious refusal to acknowledge requests for a last.fm widget might possibly have something to do with their deal with Sonific, I’m going to get accused of conspiracy-theorising (again), aren’t I?

(This is my third theory on the absence of a last.fm widget so far today, and I have to say it is my favourite.)

I demystify the behaviour of post tagegory links. Again. No, this time I think I’ve got it, especially as another thread shows us bloated global tag PR in action (hat tip: timethief, in comments).

In a nutshell, they point to global tags in order to get Google traffic to the tag pages, because that traffic gets shown ads. The lack of labelling? I’m still thinking about that. Possibly it’s to get more people onto the tags pages and back out onto other blogs, so that people see viewers coming in from tags and think ‘hey, this is cool, if I use more tags maybe I’ll get more visitors!’ More tags = more tag links = higher PR for tag pages = more ad revenue.

That, or they can’t be bothered to edit the template function.

When mature blogs are fixed so that they are no longer forced to link into a system that does not benefit them, I will consider this an acceptable form of monetisation. (Granted, a form of monetisation that relies on confusing and irritating your users, but then so is advertising in general: it’s a necessary evil.) Forcing people to link back to a system that gives them traffic is fair enough, though refusing to label the links remains shady. Breaking their links purely for your own benefit? Doesn’t look good. Although I suppose the Automattic mentality is that they deserve to be punished for failing to be family-friendly and depriving them of adsense pennies (seeing as how Google’s ToS prevents them showing ads on those blogs).

But add to this Kissing Bandit’s contention that Google has already banned Technorati’s tag pages and options’s discovery that VIPs are allowed to opt out of global tags, even though they’re told when they sign up that those linkbacks are required; and things are getting slightly murky again.

(Global tags needs its own global tag, I think. This will be pleasingly meta.)

eta: well, whaddya know, Matt just locked both threads, so we must be on to something. Wonder if he’ll stick around to answer any actual support questions?

Root says, in the middle of yet another thread about global tags (I don’t know where Lorelle gets this strange idea that if we complain, they might change it):

Of course strictly speaking there are no *kids* at WordPress dot com anyway.

Which seems as good a moment as any to mention that Xanga got fined $1million for COPPA violations last year. They had well over a million kids, though, so I don’t expect Automattic are worried. We have a lot fewer than that, and at less than a dollar a child, the ads on the kiddieblogs would easily cover the fine

What I would like? I would like wordpress.com to wipe the illegally-obtained email addresses of under-13s from its database. (Yes, I know they’re not going to do anything bad with that data, but do any of us know where we’re going to be in a few years time? You can’t promise that any future owner wouldn’t sell addresses on, any more than Danga could promise that there would never be ads on livejournal.) I would like some way of telling wordpress.com that I am over 18 and I don’t need protecting from content that they or one of their users considers ‘mature’. And I would really like somebody to explain to me why, if both wordpress.com and livejournal are based in California, only one of them is required to abide by US law.

(Before you try, I don’t think the ‘common carrier’ argument is going to work on a host which actively monitors content for links it doesn’t like the look of. And I’m not going to be convinced by ‘we don’t ask for birthdates so we don’t know how old they are’ either. If I go to a blog’s About page and it tells me the author’s twelve, I’m going to go ahead and assume the author’s twelve. And you should probably be grateful that I am neither a paedophile nor a Daily Mail reporter.)