wordpress™ wank

…I am entering Design Vitality’s WordPress Theme Design Competition even though:

• it is quite the most blatant bit of PR-building I have seen since, oh, yesterday, when I was looking at my global tag links
• I have no compelling reason to believe that the prizes a) exist or b) will be awarded. (I was there for the kcyap scam; if I wasn’t cynical, I’d be stupid.)
• The fact that the public are voting and themes aren’t anonymous means it’s a popularity contest rather than a design one. (Actually, I don’t know whether they’re even checking IPs, so it could just be rewarding whoever has the most time to set aside for clicking on their own theme.)
• Even if it were not for the above, I have not a cat in hell’s chance of winning anything because a) I’m not that good, b) I just can’t bring myself to do yet another design with a Big Blue Header, and c) I am lamely trying to do something different, and different never does well in popularity contests (or design contests, come to that)

because:

• I am too lazy to do any theming nowadays without pressure of a deadline and faint chance of remuneration
• I wanted to experiment with a ridiculous number of sidebars. I don’t know whether it works, but it was fun trying. If you can’t take risks, why bother?
• On the same lines, it’s part of my campaign to free the wordpress from the stranglehold of the ubersafe Big Blue Header. (Also, enough with the ‘premium’ ‘magazine-style’ themes already. WordPress isn’t actually that great as a CMS. Go learn textpattern and save yourself the pain of screwing around with query_posts.)
• ooh, imaginary iPhone! imaginary Wii! Shiny!

[I am a moron, aren't I?]

Interesting post on how wordpress.com chooses when to serve ads. Especially good on the global tags racket:

tags are typically the keywords you use in search queries as well, and here you have pages optimised for such a keyword, with lots of inlinks from relevant posts using that keyword as anchor text, on a high-authority domain.

Of course, said relevant posts aren’t using the keyword as anchor text voluntarily, but who cares about usability when there are backlinks to be exploited?

Here we have a guy taking his crusade against Litespeed to the .org forums. (Litespeed is the server software the official WP sites use instead of Apache; it’s recommended on their requirements page and Codex.)

LiteSpeed is not only a commercial product, but it’s closed source and most likely includes code from LightTPD and / or NGINX which are free. WordPress is already benefitting this commercial venture being the posterboy for LiteSpeed, which has very expensive licensing (they charge $250 PER CORE in your server, a dual opteron 280 would cost you $1,000) and they also delve in censorship with a policy that bans its use for legal adult content (I wonder how come WordPress.com runs LiteSpeed, when it’s chock full of adult content to the point of being banned in Turkey?).

Couple of points:

• I don’t know how many people are running around with the misapprehension that wordpress.com is blocked in Turkey because of adult content, but that really can’t be good for the brand.
• Yes, in an ideal world WP would use only free open source software, but in the real world Automattic are a business and they have to go with what works best. If the free open source tools won’t cut it, then they can’t use them. Some of us wish they had taken this more pragmatic approach years ago when it came to picking forum software. Or wordpress.com themes. Still, better late than never.
• Of course, not being GPL means you can dictate who gets to use your code :
  

  You can not use the SOFTWARE for a Warez site or a Porn site. This includes sexual content, or direct links to adult content elsewhere. This is also true for sites that promote any illegal activity.

  Um, you think nobody on wordpress.com ever posts ’sexual content’ or links to porn sites? Why do we have a ‘mature’ tag then? Oh, right, it’s to keep the adult content hidden from Club Penguiners, Christians and LITESPEED!

• Clearly, this is bonkers. So yeah, can we please work on getting the free open source tools to cut it, because then you can go around being smug about only using OS stuff and you won’t have to pretend you don’t know about their loopy licencing requirements. Because if you’re profiting from someone else’s work it’s good manners to respect their wishes, whether those wishes are that you refrain from removing their credit link, or refrain from linking to porn sites, or refrain from using their code when they’ve specifically asked you not to. I know that the licensing requirements of third parties are of little concern to Automattic since if you’re not using GPL you are evil and deserve to be screwed (and if you are using GPL, you have already issued them with permission to screw you), but I can’t help thinking that one day this cavalier attitude towards other people’s terms of use is going to end up backfiring.

[kudos for this story goes to adam. I don't spend anything like enough time in the .org forums to pick these things up myself.]

Chaos Theory has been launched. I found this unfinished theme hiding in the repository a while ago, but assumed that it had been abandoned when Bryan was fired and written out of history. But no! it’s here. Nobody has bothered upgrading it to 1.0 (yes, that’s right, it’s Sandbox-based), or for that matter styling the comments form; but that’s not surprising, since apparently it was designed by… nobody.

Root said the other day that Matt was a Stalinist, and while this is clearly hyperbole, I have to admit that things around here are becoming ever more 1984. See that smiley in the corner? It’s watching you.

If these themes are going to be GPL and free to .org users, they’re not charging for the theme. They’re charging for the ability to use the theme on your wordpress.com blog. In the case of CSS-only themes, people can already do this if they pay $15 for the custom CSS upgrade.

So anyone who wants to charge $15 or over for a CSS-only theme ought to be excluded from the program right now. Because either they don’t know anything about wordpress.com, or they’re trying to profit from the naivete of .com users, and in both cases we can really do without their contribution.

It gets worse. If I buy custom CSS I can have as many unique themes as I like for one flat rate. If I buy hypothetical premium theme I just get one. What if it turns out not to look so hot with my box.net widget? What if my readers complain the contrast on the text isn’t high enough? Do I get a refund? Do I get the ability to edit it? What if I switch themes and decide I want my premium theme back? Do I have to buy it all over again?

Maybe we should put the bar at $10? But then, is the convenience of having the theme installed for you really worth even that much? As Mark points out, most bloggers, even the clueless ones that Matt is targeting, have mastered the intricacies of copy/paste. A fair number can even upload their own images (fancy!).

There’s more. How many free themes do you think are going to get added to wordpress.com once this starts up? I mean, we’re not exactly snowed under at the moment. Free users will end up stuck with the same old ageing themes they’ve seen a million times before on a million other blogs. People who are actually part of wordpress.com, as opposed to outsiders wanting to make a quick buck out of the clueless people*, will want fresh new themes to be available to as many people as possible.

They’ll probably use their shady credits system to make it impossible to set prices below a dollar. I might be able to live with a dollar. I don’t like the idea of 50c of that going into Matt’s pocket, because people who run around turning down $200 million don’t need handouts, and I did vow never to give Automattic any cash ever again after they stole that $5 from me. But then who knows how many Adsense pennies they’ve made out of me already, by simple virtue of my continuing to blog here? And who knows what my bandwidth would cost, if I were paying for it? And it’s not as if I particularly want the 50c for myself. Exchange rates the way they are, it wouldn’t buy me a packet of crisps. Besides, every time I try to make money out of designing, the joy goes out of it. It turns into work.

Do you see how once you drop your asking price to the absolute minimum, the 50/50 split becomes slightly less painful? And how things are fairer for the end users, who get a wider choice of themes and aren’t screwed over quite as badly in the process?

The argument against this is that it devalues the work of the designers. I say that since .org users are getting it free anyway and you’re not even allowed to include a link to your portfolio, it’s already been devalued. If you genuinely think your theme is worth $50, then you’re not going to give it away for free. And if you don’t genuinely think your theme is worth $50 (which you clearly don’t, since you’re giving it away for free) then it’s not particularly ethical to try and sell it for that amount. This applies equally to designers and their Automattic overlords, by the way. And please don’t say ‘it’s worth whatever people are willing to pay for it’. Ripping people off is not rendered morally acceptable by the victim’s willingness to be ripped off.

Anyway, this is all highly academic. How long has the Adsense upgrade been promised? How long has themes.wordpress.net been dead? How long was domain mapping ‘coming soon’? Exactly. I don’t know why we’re all getting so worked up.

Basically, Matt wants everyone to sell him GPL stylesheets to use on wordpress.com and wp.org/extend/themes

I know. Why don’t you just support the CSS upgrade properly (i.e. take a few less months getting Sandbox up to date, stop telling people they need to be experts to buy it, maybe even provide a couple of nice copy/paste stylesheets to get them started) and build your market around that? Except, oh yeah, the people who are already producing CSS-based themes for wordpress.com (and not charging, since a) they just want to make the place a little less homogenous and b) it would get them ToSed) are evidently not the calibre you want to work with.

Basically, you just threw ntuat.wordpress.com down the drain. Nothing there is going to be eligible for inclusion because it’s not brand-new and I’m not a professional. (Some of it’s not even mine, they’re ports of third-party GPL themes that were either requested or which I felt filled a gap in the existing selection.) People are going to be even less interested in buying custom CSS if they can pay the same price and get an official theme that doesn’t need to be copy/pasted. Assuming that custom CSS is still available, of course, rather than having been removed because people are using it to rip off all these killer premium themes.

I do what the almighty Matt commands — I design stuff that is free as in both speech and as in beer, that requires people to give him money in order to use — and I still get slapped in the face. But that’s OK. I’m collateral damage. Ultimately this will be a really great way to screw more money out of naive .com users of giving people more options about how they want their blog to look. And when this fabled marketplace is opened to people outside Matt’s circle of friends, I may even chuck some skins in there at a few cents each. Because honestly? Seeing as how it’s GPL and the styles will be free for .org users, I would feel like a complete shill charging any more than a nominal amount.

Without venturing a comment on the truth or motives behind techcrunch’s $200 million story, here is my worthless prediction: they’re not going to sell until they’ve opened up global tags to everyone (or at least everyone with an API key, got to keep those signups rolling in). Because being the new technorati, except with super-duper servers that never fall over, has to be worth something. And I expect they’d like to get whatever something it is worth.

Also, maybe they’re dragging their feet on the Adsense upgrade because it would be such a hassle to switch everyone onto Yahoo Publisher If Google was in the frame, wouldn’t we have the option to place Adsense units by now? Discuss.