wordpress™ wank

I think we are all aware by now that Automattic are generally averse to having official policies on anything much, apart from affiliate links/adsense/spam/miscellaneous profiteering etc. being Teh Evil (unless they are doing it, in which case it is OK). Official policies, like, totally stifle your freedom to make the rules up as you go along. Hence, while having over a dozen tagegories on your posts probably will get you kicked out of the global ad tag pages and labelled a spammer, it’s ‘not a published rule‘ (in fact, the exact nature of the rule is a closely guarded secret) and the FAQ blithely insists there is no limit on the number of tags you can have. Who knows, one day Scoble might experience an urge to tagspam. It’s so much easier to change the rules if they’re obscure in the first place.

Inevitably, however, sometimes the freedom to invent policy on the hoof leads to staff inventing entirely different policies on the same thing without each other’s knowledge.

Last January, Mad at blog-well.com appealed for the ability to redirect traffic from their old wordpress.com blog to their new wordpress.org blog. Matt responded in comments with a workaround:

Did you try adding the domain to this blog, making it your primary URL, and then switching the DNS back to GoDaddy? It should redirect all visitors from blogwell.wordpress.com to the new domain on the new host, at least as long as you pay the 10/yr for parking.

Yay! Mad was very happy and grateful for this solution, as were several people who showed up later in the same comments thread. In response to the support issues arising from this thread, six months later Mad produced a PDF tutorial on how to make the move from .com to .org. Yay again.

Unfortunately, Matt appears to have neglected to tell his head of support that he has been promoting this feature, and when a year on from Mad’s how-to guide somebody shows up on the forums asking for clarification Mark censors the link to the tutorial, says it’s ‘unsupported’ and could stop at any time, then suggests that accounts caught doing it could be nuked. Raincoaster backs him up, having experience of seeing such blogs deleted.

Look, I know it can be hard for everyone to be on the same page because you’re all in different countries in different timezones doing different things, but your communication breakdowns should really not be the users’ problem. The original poster’s question was very simple: is it allowed, or is it not allowed? That should be answerable with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Qualified ‘yes’ and ‘no’, perhaps, such as ‘you would need to have hosted your blog here for x amount of time’ or ‘you would have to have bought your domain through us’, or ‘only if you opt out of global tags’. Or even, if that would be too boring and straightforward to fit with the way you like to do things, the standard business-blog response of ‘contact support detailing your individual circumstances so a decision can be made’. But still, you know, some sort of reasoning other than the whim of whoever happens to be answering the question today. People who are promoting solutions given to them by your boss can be forgiven for thinking the solution is company-approved.

It’s really unfortunate that BrowseHappy keeps getting hacked in this way, isn’t it? I suppose its artifically enhanced pagerank, along with its neglected state, makes it an easy and attractive target for spammers. It’s lucky that other people are keeping an eye on it, or those juicy little PR8 links would be hanging around indefinitely. And that would never do.

Maybe Matt should consider moving it to a more secure server. Or switch it to a secure CMS. Or get rid of the frickin’ spamlinks to his outdated little hobbysite altogether, except of course said domain wouldn’t then be worth nearly as much should he ever decide to sell it on to a browser manufacturer of his choosing. (Bubbles burst, you know; got to have a few insurance policies in place.)

If you don’t have time to maintain the domain, quit squatting it and hand it over to Mozilla already. That would be the beautiful, self-sacrificing, open-source thing to do. You could even write a beautiful, self-sacrificing post on ma.tt and the dead blog about it. I can hear the faraway echo of fanboys cheering already.

Is anyone else in love with the fact that the ‘possibly related’ spam links at the end of this encourage us to equate usability testing with a cholera epidemic?

(BTW, Toni’s linked post appears to confirm that Hanni didn’t stick around for long. All 21 staff are now namechecked on the about page. )

Meanwhile, on the .com forums, mikecane and fromtheleft have been unpersoned for hating on Sphere and the new dashboard, and this poor guy got shunted over to wordpress.org before being shoved right back over here, none too politely at that (why yes, it was moshu, since you ask). He asked for help ever so nicely, too. It was quite sad.

A new feature for the Big Blue Navbar, possibly prompted by this forum thread

(I don’t know what on earth Isadora thinks is the main problem. I thought all the ‘bad elements’ were banned so as not to get in the way of her and the happiness engineers? Something’s scaring Trent and the happiness engineers off posting, and it ain’t me.)

[This was going to be a comment on my last post, but it was getting so unwieldy I thought I'd promote it]

Well, Matt seems to have these brainstorms every so often. It tends to coincide with the party season. Or, apparently, major conferences. Hard to see what Toni and the Happiness Engineers (hey! they sound like a Fifties girl group!) could do about that, other than fit Matt’s laptop with some form of alarm that starts wailing and locks down the keyboard when he mentions validation, grammar, or his own general fantasticness for giving ‘his’ software away.

Also, not all the code on wordpress.com is GPL. Nor is all the code in Akismet. Six Apart understand better than anyone else that Automattic are a business, and that letting people have wp.com out of the box or disclosing Akismet’s inner workings to spammers would make no sense whatsoever. But it looks like you’re trying to hide the fact when you refuse to concede the truth of it. Owning up to closing some of your source for sound reasons is a lot more open and honest than encouraging the fanboys to believe that everything you do is 100% open when it’s not.

Paradoxes are fun. Embrace them.

The most interesting thing about this whole brouhaha is Matt’s overreaction. He clearly feels far more threatened by Six Apart than anyone would have suspected based on, well, the facts and figures; not to mention the psychological advantage of his current success being largely due to their earlier failure. They must be really happy. It would be very easy for them to spin this as Automattic falling apart in the face of a renewed challenge from an older company that has already made its mistakes and learned from them. Or as Matt being not quite ready for the cut and thrust of big business. I think drmike is probably right in saying that it’s Toni’s job to mentor Matt through this period and stop him getting wound up by the competition, but I’m not sure he actually has the authority to tell Matt not to do anything, CEO or no CEO.

In a year or two, people may look back on this spat, coinciding as it does with the delayed release of 2.5 and the brokenness of .com, and say it was the point that WordPress jumped the shark. Certainly I’d never seen so many discontented people on the .com forums before this week. No wonder Matt is freaking out.

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.)

Inspired by this piece of newsblog frivolity (Mum! they’re stealing my ideas again!) and Cornell’s post on the subject, comments are now open for you to tell everyone who you voted for instead.

(I went with Mint, because I had vaguely heard of it, and the Ning woman, because she is a woman and Ning is a fun word.)

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!

…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?]

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.

Um, thanks for updating Sandbox so I can now use my beloved span.meta-nav but if you want people to use it you might want to deminiaturise the code editor:

Weirdly, this doesn’t happen when you get to it through the standard ‘edit CSS’ tab, it’s just when you click on the redundant new link next to the screenshot:

I think my blog is the best place to report this because a) support is generally shut, b) nobody in the forum has backend access and c) it’s a trivial bug caused by clicking on a link that doesn’t need to be there in the first place, and is therefore sort of my own fault.

Also, can somebody with a better grasp of the semantic subtleties explain to me the distinction between ‘minimal’ and ‘minimalist’?

While you’re at it, do you think you could explain why White as Milk isn’t considered ‘minimal’ or ‘minimalist’ even though it actually contains the word ‘minimal’ in the theme description? Where do these random tags even come from? I know Automattic don’t trust the mob but I’m fairly sure they could do a better job than this.