discouraged

So, I thought I’d get around to updating all my old Sandbox skins to support gravatars, spamlinks related posts and the like. But nuh-uh.

Once more Automattic’s hatred of all things design-related intervenes and I can’t upload .txt files anymore. Like it wasn’t annoying enough being denied .zip and .css. Wait, it gets better. We can’t even pop the CSS in a textarea for people to copy/paste.

What is especially hilarious is that the default text in the ‘edit CSS’ box still says:

Things we encourage include:
* @media blocks!
* sharing your CSS!
* testing in several browsers!
* helping others in the forum!

Let’s leave aside for now the fact that helping others in the forum is emphatically not encouraged: how, exactly, do they want me to share my CSS? Put it in a Word document? Paste the entire 550-line production into one of their ugly sourcecode shortcodes? Host it elsewhere? They really don’t want us using any of that 3gb they so generously ‘gave’ us, do they?

(Of course, the main reason I’m blogging this is to get a response to my support ticket. That’s how it works these days: you fill in the form, and then you blog about it. It’s really about time they bit the bullet and set up an autoresponder, because the current method of having to report things twice isn’t the most efficient.)

jumping the snark

I imagine Six Apart draw considerable comfort from the fact that the Matt/Lloyd tag team still considers them enough of a threat to attack them at every opportunity. Far worse to be Blogger, and too crap to be scary.

But then, Blogger’s not in direct competition. Blogger’s already been bought.

I imagine I am not the only person drawing amusement from the spectacle of Automattic and Six Apart scrapping it out to be perceived as the the most valuable acquisition. I know I shouldn’t laugh. Recessions are not funny. I suppose I’m laughing at the pretence that it’s about who makes the better software. That ceased to be the point a long time ago. And when it was the point, there was a lot less bitterness and fear floating round.

Goddamn credit crunch. You make the snark so much more serious.

all your site are belong to kids

I observe that Matt is compensating for the loss of his beloved default blogroll by sneaking a link to his blog into the footer of wordpress.com:

Cute. He’s got couple of years at most before people cease to find his obsession with being #1 in Google endearing and start to think it sad (it is rather adolescent, after all), so he might as well optimise while the sun shines.

Also, they have done away with the stupid faux-blog design of the forums and made the fonts teeny-tiny to further discourage participation by anyone over the age of fourteen. Yay!

sting

Hurrah! We have a new moderator/secret staff member who is still in thrall to the commonsensical notion that categories are local and tags are global, and has as yet no clue about tags and categories actually work here.

Ah well. They’ll learn.

Still on the tagegory hobbyhorse: in which universe does catapulting your readers away from your blog and into wordpress.com’s global tag system without warning constitute ‘easy navigation’?

Easy navigation would be if you told them where they were actually going before they clicked on the link. Easy navigation would be if the same link text didn’t take you to entirely different destinations depending on the location of the text. You must be using the word ‘navigation’ in a different sense to designers and usability experts. Or maybe you’re just redefining the word ‘easy’.

At least they sold a few more CSS upgrades and gifted themselves another couple of thousand tag page links. Ad revenue must be suffering in the credit crunch for them to do this now. It’s only a matter of time before all non-logged-in users start seeing ads on wordpress.com, if they don’t already.

Oh, and anyone else notice that Matt’s pet designer has been hauled out of the chilly waters of freelancing? Anyone else not surprised? I suppose it significantly lessens the pain of having to hire somebody outside your company if you transform all your subcontractors into employees sooner or later. Not to mention suddenly being able to claim that Monotone was designed entirely by Automattic. Still being beaten hollow by Tarski and Dum-Dum in the download wars, though, despite the front-page screenshot. That must sting.