fattening the calf
September 24, 2008 
Oh look, they just gobbled up another struggling startup. (I surmise Intense Debate were struggling since a) they’re currently closed to new signups, which strongly suggests recent encounters with the failwhale and b) they’re not Disqus, who were presumably beyond Automattic’s budget.)
I did wonder why suddenly threaded comments were on the roadmap for 2.7 after years of being dismissed as plugin territory, and now we know. It also explains the influx of new staffers on the forums. If this means we finally get threaded comments on wp.com then it is a Very Good Thing, but I still have my doubts about whether such a massive change is feasible. There are a lot of comments to migrate in this system, and if any got lost in the transition people would be cross.
Obviously I do have concerns about Automattic being in control of a centralized comment service, given the way Akismet’s been used to block troublemakers in the past. But then I’m already blogging on a server where they can edit or delete any comments at any time, so it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me.
[edited to add links. I'm getting lazy.]
slappage
September 13, 2008
Filed under design, dot com, free beer fundamentalists, idiocy, megalomania, wank
Another day, another theme.
Oh dear. Did nobody tell him that wordpress.com users don’t take kindly to being told what widget goes where? The kind of fine-grained control that professionals demand is a really, really bad fit with wordpress.com. You may know exactly what you want the sidebar to look like — search box at the top, categories below it, kewl javascripty thing — but your users are not necessarily going to share that view.
I seriously believe that before anyone designs a theme for wordpress.com they need to be sat down and forced to scroll through twenty random blogs, followed by a day or two on the forums. Then they will understand how people plan to mutilate their beautiful design with excessive numbers of pages with unfeasibly long titles, outsized widgets, crazy fonts pasted in from Word, video clips, photos the size of a bus and languages other than English. And, when they have finished sobbing, they will be able to take evasive action to make it slightly more difficult to break.
Meanwhile, yet another discussion on how it is, and will always be, evil in the eyes of the dictator to profiteer from designing for WordPress, wherein I challenge Matt to name his favourite GPL themes before belatedly realising that he is obviously referring to Prologue and Monotone. Like Matt would ever publically express admiration for a theme he wasn’t personally involved with.
Sometimes, still, I am so touchingly naive I am compelled to slap my forehead. Hard.
almost autumn
September 3, 2008 
I’m trying the new theme, since Automattic’s recent policy of hiring professionals to produce .com themes is broadly to be applauded. Yes, it would be nice if they could also release them for .org in the conventional manner rather than expecting people to grab an svn checkout, but I suppose they need to maintain some semblance of exclusivity or what would be the point in spending the money? The release of another professional theme for free also pretty much confirms that the half-baked theme marketplace idea has been shelved, though I think we’d all figured that out anyway.
Of course, if my previous wordpress.com theme experiences are anything to go by, something will be horribly broken and I’ll be back on Almost Spring by tomorrow. But it looks pretty so I’ll give it a go.
ETA: ok, thirty seconds and I’ve found the brokenness; the widget implementation is a weirdly partial thing which has a static sidebar of search, categories and a funny little module you can switch between top posts/latest comments/tags. You can’t move or remove the top three ‘widgets’ regardless of whether you need or want them.
If you want to enable widgets, enable the whole damn sidebar, not just the bottom half of it. Fail.
[sighs and goes back to Almost Spring]
