templates must look 50% different to qualify as your own. oh, ok, how are we going to measure that then? with a ruler? scales? a differentometer?
[head hurts]
Archive for ancient history
who’s your daddy?
One thing that only seems to be mentioned by the other developers is that wordpress.org is Matt’s personal fiefdom and they clearly don’t get any say in how it’s run (and I don’t get the impression they particularly want one either). They’re trying to make a distinction between wordpress (a community effort) and wordpress.org (Matt). I am not at all sure that anyone believes in this distinction, least of all Matt.
One thing I don’t see mentioned much either is why he resorted to these methods rather than having a wikipedia-style donation drive. It’s fairly evident to me that encouraging donations would also encourage people to think they have a stake in the project which they don’t actually have. So much of the anger when MT changed their licensing terms came from donators — I gave you money and you screwed me. If people give you money you’re beholden to them. I gave you money and you’re taking forever to come up with a new release. I gave you money and you still don’t have that great new feature I asked you for. I gave you money and you’re hosting spam articles on your site. Handing the financial side over to the community sounds lovely in theory, but in practice is a very poor fit with the legendary cliqueishness of the development team. If you want to be told what to do, you’re working for The Man and getting remunerated accordingly, not coding open source stuff.
Is it better to take the money from search engine scammers and be beholden to them instead? Possibly. I mean, all they want from you is your pagerank. It’s not requiring you to give up control of your baby. The fanboys will forgive you whichever way you screw them, sensible people will realise that you are not the software (if we’re bothered by the sale of our pagerank to con artists, removing the link or adding ‘nofollow’ to it takes care of that in approximately five seconds) and who really cares about the rest?
People keep saying Matt’s made a mistake. It would be a mistake if he cared about public relations (which he doesn’t, really — that’s been illustrated multiple times), and it would be a mistake if he cared about defrauding Google (which he doesn’t, or he’d not have put the articles up in the first place). From his point of view — wanting to establish once and for all that WordPress is his baby and nothing very much to do with anyone else — it’s not a mistake at all. Hey, he got the cash all by himself, without relying on the charity or approval of a third party.
And the reason he didn’t tell anyone what he was doing — not the other developers, not the fanboys, not the general mass of indifferent users — was not because he was ashamed, but because he didn’t think it was any of their business. If you don’t get that by now, you don’t get WordPress.
spew
To top off a day full of WordPress wankery spurting all over the net, the competition results are now out. I ain’t saying nothing.
well ok then, I might wonder whether the combination of black, yellow, neon green and internet blue is ‘creative’ or merely migraine-inducing. but that would be all.
woah
Woah. WordPress.org has been taking money to host spam links on the front page, hiding them with CSS and not telling anyone about it.
I was this close to pitying the demented fanboys who believed that the project had some integrity and were going to get their illusions shattered, but then I read some of their ‘waah! you are crucifying poor Matt who has done so much good for others! I hate you! waaah!’ comments and remembered the only thing I should be pitying them for is their impenetrable stupidity.
Also, Mr. King is now refusing to release his theme browser code to rival theme repositories. But how can he do that? It’s GPL, surely? It comes within spitting distance of a WordPress installation so it must be. Do you think we can sue him?
I’m off to redirect my wordpress link to a page that won’t benefit spammers, now. I’m thinking maybe textpattern.com, that would really mess with people’s heads.
women exist, part 3687490103
now I am merely disappointed that Mr. King, knowing he’d lost the argument, did his usual trick of closing the thread before I could inform redneck Chad that not all theme developers are male.
I know, it’s shocking, isn’t it? Next thing you know they’ll be letting us code plugins.
egotistical misogynist demented fanboys
So. I finally send off the bloody theme and I get ‘ooh, I don’t know if CC Attribution is GPL-compatible…’ which to be honest I was half-expecting, though I can’t work out if he’s being genuinely stupid (it is listed as a GPL-compatible licence on a page he linked to himself on his own site) or just looking for an excuse not to let me enter because of my comments about the judging. Which is fine, because as you know I just love to have excuses to rage against the egotistical misogynist demented fanboys of the WordPress community.
Oh, and of course nobody has bothered to explain why it is so crucial that all templates be GPL-compatible, and why we are expected to use a licence designed for software rather than templates, but that would be because we’re not expected to question these things. Though I have to say that a system where this and this and this go in no questions asked, while my perfectly presentable 3-col theme gets umm-ed and ahh-ed about just because I dared ask to be credited, is just a tiny bit screwed.
er, what?
Did somebody actually submit a theme with a bunch of pictures of themselves, their family, friends and dog on it, or am I hallucinating?
officially a mug
The only reason I started posting to the WP forums after a year’s break was that I needed help with theming and the wiki is inadequate. Of course, when you mention that the wiki is inadequate you get the stock response of ‘add to it yourself’. Yes, and if I knew what I was supposed to be adding I would, but if I were in the position of being able to answer my own questions I would not be bothering with your poxy support system in the first place. I would be getting on with coding the bloody theme, would I not?
Meanwhile they’re bitching on the wp-docs list that they have too many user accounts and any that are inactive after six months should be deleted. Look, you either welcome occasional contributors or you kick them out. Can’t have it both ways.
(We already had this debate a couple of months back, when lurkers on the list were cordially invited to start contributing to the wiki immediately or piss off. I would have unsubscribed back then, were it not for the fact that this was what they wanted.)
So, I am having to learn about conditional statements in PHP because the wiki tells lies. No, I’ll rephrase that. I am having to learn about conditional statements in PHP because the wiki predicated the existence of certain templates which the developers, in their infinite wisdom, had decided not to bother with after all. Now, I don’t think it’s that arcane to want your archives for a single day laid out differently from your archives for an entire year, but apparently this is a rare and strange requirement requiring the use of conditional statements, so yeah.
I still don’t particularly see the need for separate templates at all, but the more you have, the more ‘complete’ your work will be deemed to be, so I’m throwing in everything I can think of. It’s a bit like those essays where you tell the teacher what they want to hear rather than what you actually think. Competitions, I find, are as soul-rotting as customs, but without the rewards. The only decently-sized prize ($150) is getting assigned randomly, which rather depressingly suggests that the lead developer doesn’t believe anyone will come up with a design worthy of winning and has decided to turn the whole thing into a lottery. So somebody who’s done a new stylesheet for an existing theme is just as likely to win $150 as someone who’s gone to the trouble of learning about conditional statements.
Why have I wasted so much time on this stupid theme? I am officially a mug.
snark
I have now established to my own satisfaction that a Creative Commons license is GPL-compatible, and if anyone tries to tell me I can’t insist on people keeping the credit on my theme I will hit them with links, legal jargon, and the usual pretentious stuff about artistic integrity. It looks like I will have to give up the ‘don’t use my stuff for commercial purposes’ condition though, and that makes me sad. If businesses are too cheap to fork out for an MT license they should at least have to pay for a decent WordPress template.
Stupidity surrounding the themes contest so far: randoms claiming ‘all skill levels are welcome’ (thanks for that, hideous and badly-coded layouts are such a valuable contribution to the community), a $40 Starbucks card for the best no-frills template (that’s going to be useful to anyone outside America), and people being bribed to come up with a hokey late-’90s-styles layout that looks like a Real Diary (I am so tempted to take them up on this).
getting a sense of proportion
Overview of the market share of various blog tools :
I'm often amused by the petty bickering that goes on in the blogging community over which tool is better – Movable Type, WordPress, Expression Engine, etc. Who cares? In the consumer market, less than 1 percent of those wanting to blog have the skill level or desire to deal with HTML tags, let alone configuring scripts for a server. These tools will never win in the consumer space; they are just too difficult to use.
As you would expect, the wordpressers fail to get the point, complain about the methodology (she's been careless about the urls she actually searches for) and claim they're underrepresented. You could make the same claim about diaryland, which like Typepad has a passwording option (30% sounds like a reasonable figure there as well.) Or for livejournal, which quite possibly has more friends-locked journals than public ones (as well as an easy-to-implement option to block the Googlebot). Livejournal currently claims over 2.6 million active users.
Face it. Whichever way you slant it, the majority of bloggers will still be teenage girls. You could try and slant it by heading to Technorati for your stats, but those numbers wouldn't be any more truthful than these. The truth is that bloggers, especially the young female variety, are mercurial creatures; opening accounts all over the place, starting more than one blog on the same server, abandoning them when parents or stalkers or nicer usernames intervene. And yes, you could argue that such promiscuity makes it look like there's more of us than there really are; but even taking that into account, women and girls own this medium.
This is what freedom looks like. It's hard to measure.
I think most of my frustrations with wordpress have been borne of wanting things to be easier. Wishing you could find out how to do something without having to look in thirty different places. Wanting template tags to be more intuitive. Having to delve into the core files to get control over how the output's presented. But once you remind yourself that it is, and always will be, a minority tool by hackers for hackers, it's not so annoying anymore; and, to be honest, most of the annoyingness comes from the community rather than the actual software anyway.
(I have, by the way, decided to hold off on the upgrade for now, simply because my favourite plugins won't work on the test installation. Not prepared to junk lj-synching or dropdown comments for the debatable joys of theming. Put it this way: my site ain't broke, and if I attempt to fix it I'm fairly certain it will be.)
wordpress™ wank 