Archive for January, 2009

rip codex. oh, sorry, i meant R.I.P. codex.

January 21, 2009 at 9:26 pm · Filed under bubble, Pontification, wank, wiki woes

So, according to Lorelle, Codex is officially dead and being superceded by the WordPress HandBook. Lorelle being Lorelle, she doesn’t admit that Codex is officially dead, but nor does she provide any coherent explanation of how and why two ‘online manuals’ sharing much of the same content can operate side by side. (She can’t seriously believe that Codex will still have a role as ‘a highly technical and historical guide to WordPress’. Firstly, the techies wouldn’t touch Codex with a bargepole, they’re all about the PHPXref. Secondly, a historical online manual is about as much use as a chocolate teapot, otherwise we’d still be directing people to wiki.wordpress.org so they could read about how to get the best out of 1.2.)

Obviously, switching from mediawiki to XML and SVN is going to effectively debar all but the most dedicated from contributing (for which, read Lorelle and people on the Automattic payroll), but that’s not a bad thing, since a) Codex was not exactly overwhelmed with volunteers, the docs project being a proud part of the long-standing WP tradition of treating volunteers like crap, and b) community-written documentation is next to impossible to keep up-to-date, especially when pursuing a quarterly release schedule. Bringing it under the Automattic umbrella at least means that it will be updated, even if it does constitute another step in the process of taking the community out of wordpress and wordpress away from the community.

It’s nice that Automattic have decided to focus on documentation this cycle — it was about time — but I can’t help wondering how much cross-referencing will be going on between the new written documentation and the new proprietary traffic-building ad-carrying video stuff…

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spinner

January 19, 2009 at 11:02 pm · Filed under bubble, dot com, megalomania, speculation, wank

More proof, if proof were in fact needed, that ma.tt long ago ceased to be a proper blog and is now a corporate mouthpiece. (I’d have linked to the actual comment, but no, we can not has permalinks.)

wordpress.tv itself is, exactly as you would expect, a wordpress.com blog with a bunch of videos, aimed at getting Automattic a monopoly on video tutorials and driving its rival purveyors of ‘spammy promotional videos’ out of business. (At the time of writing, wordpresstutorials.com is still top of Google for ‘wordpress video tutorials‘ — why else do you think Automattic are linking to this new blog so assiduously? Look at the wp.com version of the announcement and its eight links to the target site, it’s like SEO 101.)

Since I can read faster than most people can speak and am not a raving fanboy, I am not the target audience. Naturally, the only community-produced content is the wordcamp stuff (enough to keep the fanboys happy) and the instructional videos are all produced inhouse so there’s no risk of anyone promoting any themes or plugins that aren’t. I don’t know how much they’ll make out of the Adsense on this one but as many of the users will be totally new to WP and looking for all the information they can find on the topic, I imagine it will be quite the moneyspinner.

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assorted cheap shots at lj

January 9, 2009 at 11:37 pm · Filed under dot com, free beer fundamentalists, global tags, kicking baby squirrels

You want to provide asylum for lj-ers? That’s beautiful, but be prepared for:

  1. complaints that they only get two icons
  2. outrage at the censoring of porn artistic work with adult content from global tags
  3. I have to PAY to have more than 35 people on my flist???!!!!1111!!!
  4. why does my picture of a nipple get rated X on Gravatar?

I think the corporate culture at wordpress.com is probably an even worse fit for your average LJ-er than Six Apart’s was; arbitrary suspensions are an everyday occurence, not a cause for scandal, and there’s more pressure to keep things PG purely because there are so many kids. I’ve had a couple of people on my flist attempt the switch to wordpress.com already, but they find there’s no community here and get tempted back to livejournal. I don’t know why there’s no sense of community here, since most of the architecture is in place. It’s an organic thing. It either happens or it doesn’t. And of course there’s always been this underlying sense that wordpress.com is a stepping stone to when you get your own real wordpress blog, and it’s hard to make people passionate about a site that they’re just passing through on their way to somewhere better.

I don’t write anything like as much about wordpress as I used to because I don’t care about it anymore. I don’t care about the new interface that will be gone the way of all the others come 3.0. I don’t care what struggling little minnows Automattic swallow on their way up, or what empty promises they made to tempt investors. I see the same old wars being fought over the GPL and I might still find them interesting if they were still about freedom and authority, but they’re not. They’re about money.

Comments (9)