wordpress™ wank

OK, well, having launched the one and only wordpress.com photoblog theme I went along to glance at that announcement of extra space which I’m using as a selling point for said theme, because why shouldn’t I too benefit from their meaningless publicity-seeking gestures? (I explain why it’s a meaningless publicity-seeking gesture here, can’t be bothered to type it out again.) Wow. I always forget how brainrotting the comments to those posts are:

This is a dream, isn’t it? o_Ô You guys amaze me, you really do. 3GB storage for free. No limited bandwidth. And still no ads? You won’t make us all pay for our accounts? This HAS to be a dream.

Yes, it’s a fucking dream. YOU DO HAVE ADS. Look! Ads!

[hits flock of Snow Lovers on head with cluestick, hard]

And, what’s more, you’re always going to have ads. Because lookie here, hidden amongst all the ecstatic bleats is Mr Matt saying:

there are no plans to change our current advertising setup, so don’t worry. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

If you’re still fielding Adsense queries in the forum, feel free to pass that link on. Or not. It might be a bit too much like volunteering.

I HAVE BEEN DEPRIVED OF MY ROLLEYES SMILEY GODDAMNIT. It’s not appearing on my last post or the last comment in which I used it even though the code is copy-pasted from another comment where it works.

OK so I had been abusing Mr Snarky somewhat of late, but to desert me entirely is just cruel. Come back! I promise I won’t work you so hard. I’ll try to express my exasperation and cynicism through the medium of, you know, words, rather than secondhand emoticons.

(Or, I could just copy the image code and summon him that way:

It’s not the most user-friendly way of summoning smilies, true, but it’s the principle of the thing. I’m not going to stop overusing emoticons just because WordPress thinks I should.)

Two DoS attacks within the week. Lovely. I don’t know why infoworld are running round saying wordpress.com users were informed of the situation by email, since I neither got one nor would expect one. (I’d settle for a status page, as opposed to a sticky post on a forum which is DOWN :roll The likeliest scenario is that they emailed the VIPs. If I was paying that much I know I’d expect to be notified. It’s kind of sloppy journalism, though.

There’s not, of course, a whole lot you can do to prevent DoS attacks apart from crossing your fingers and hoping you don’t get another one. (Having two within a week doesn’t bode well, but then I am a pessimist by nature.) You can end up with a bunch of angry frustrated users through no fault of your own. The internet is cruel like that.

The stuffing of the .com forums with paid staff who know zip about the site continues; here’s another. At least she has a blog on wordpress.com (with three whole posts!), which is more than can be said for the last one. She gets to be a Key Master too, which officially makes her more important than Mark, who is only a Member nowadays. (I do not pretend to understand anything about how forum rankings work anymore. They seem to be allocated entirely at random).

And they’re still advertising, so yeah, once there are a couple more in place they’ll actually be able to provide support on weekends and maybe stage a similar takeover of the .org forums. (Personally I think it more likely that the .org forums will be shut down entirely — anyone else notice that Matt’s name on the SXSW speaker list links to wordpress.com rather than .org?)

Of course, it may still take two paid support staff to deal with the kind of really basic CSS query that I was previously handling for free but clearly there’s enough VC money floating around now that efficiency is no longer a concern.

If you have half an hour to kill now you’re not volunteering anymore, Kubrick Guy is delivering a lengthy bitchslapping to the Dashboard over here. Now I understand why I started this blog. It is because as soon as you log in to WordPress, it’s all about WordPress, rather than about you. WordPress doesn’t understand that it’s just a tool you use for blogging. WordPress thinks you are blogging in order to use WordPress (and if you’re a fanboy, this is exactly what’s going on.) Blogging about WordPress is a natural development prompted by the immense egotism of the software.

I would say ‘who cares, the stupid Dashboard’s days are numbered anyway’, if I had any faith at all that 2.5’s implementation would be what Happy Cog actually designed rather than another weird Frankenstein baby made up of Matt’s code and their colours. Unfortunately, we’ll never be shown what they actually designed, so we won’t be able to make comparisions.

Why does Matt want Dreamweaver to wither? As a user, you would think he would want it to grow and flourish. Or did he mean to ask whither Dreamweaver?

(Please note, I only whip out my Sword of Pedantry when others use theirs first. It’s just too easy.)