Archive for Pontification

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So, according to Lorelle, Codex is officially dead and being superceded by the WordPress HandBook.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…

Comments (14)

sting

August 4, 2008 at 4:53 am · Filed under dot com, forums, global tags, Pontification, wank

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.

Comments (22)

the faraway echo of fanboys cheering

July 11, 2008 at 12:04 am · Filed under bananas, bubble, free beer fundamentalists, megalomania, Pontification, wank

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.

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the bbPress syndrome

March 27, 2008 at 8:40 pm · Filed under bubble, design, forums, i must not blog about habari, megalomania, Pontification, speculation, wank

Oh look, my half-baked ideas on default themery have won me a premium theme. Not of course that this was the intention, since I have no use for a premium theme (they are not .com-compatible, and in the event of this particular kitchen ever getting too hot for me I will be going the Habari route) I was just randomly spouting off.

It is true about Kubrick, though. Ever since I was at diaryland, I’ve believed that defaults should be a bit rubbish. It encourages people to branch out. Kubrick wasn’t quite rubbish enough a couple of years ago, which is why WP is still struggling to break free of the iron grip of the BBH. Also, it’s handy to be able to tell at a glance that the site in front of you isn’t worth reading. Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen an interesting blog using Kubrick. Anyone?

Also, here is Matt on wp-hackers studiously pretending that premium themes do not exist. Which is fair enough, since for the purposes of wordpress.org/extend/themes they pretty much don’t, and for that matter wordpress.org/extend/themes pretty much doesn’t exist either.

One day I will be done carping on this, but it will be because I am bored of saying the same thing over and over and over again rather than because anything has changed. Just this. If what is holding the vaporware marketplace up is really the impossibility of importing .zips into a user-friendly SVN setup, or the difficulty of building ‘a scalable payment system’ are these things an issue because they’re intrinsically difficult and time-consuming, or are they proving an issue because of the bbPress syndrome?

If you’ve ever spent any time at all in any WP support forums you’ll probably already have guessed what I mean by the bbPress syndrome. The bbPress syndrome is about not wanting to use anyone else’s code because you think you can do it yourself. I completely get this, because it’s why I have no use for a premium theme. It’s not that I think my own stuff’s better, it’s just that I can make my own themes so I will, even if they’re not as good-quality, or polished, or indeed time-and-labour-saving, as the ones I can grab off someone else’s shelf.

I have a really bad feeling that, rather than hiring or contracting folks with actual experience building scalable e-commerce sites (and, really, it’s not like taking money off people is something that has never been attempted on the internet before), Automattic are still trying to re-invent the wheel, keeping everything in-house and learning on the job. Which is a really great way of doing things, if you’re a hobbyist and the process is just as important as the end result. It is rather less great if you are trying to be a business, with investors and customers and a reputation to maintain. You’re wasting time, you’re wasting labour, and so even though it feels like you’re saving money you’re actually losing it.

I hope this isn’t the case. I hope that the bbPress syndrome was just a passing phase Matt went through on his journey towards being a businessman. But then I look at the forums and they’re still using bbPress. And I look at themes.wordpress.net and it’s still dead.

Comments (11)

happy new year guys!

December 29, 2007 at 2:07 pm · Filed under dot com, forums, idiocy, megalomania, Pontification, wank

the hell?

Yes, I’m relying on screenshots now because I don’t trust the links to remain intact. (I think it would be better for all concerned if it didn’t. </hint to Mark>)

I’m going to repeat what I said in my reply: is your email down or something? Because, leaving aside the question of whether or not that suggestion is appropriate, email is pretty much the only appropriate place for it. I don’t care if your volunteers (you know, volunteers? people who handle your support for free because you can’t afford to pay enough staff to do all of it?) are trying your patience, there’s no need to disrespect them in public. It makes everyone look lousy. Including you.

I do not agree with everything timethief says or does on the forums, but even her antagonists would have to concede she works damn hard. If sometimes she starts thinking she’s a moderator, that’s kind of an inevitable consequence of not having any regular moderators on the scene. (Having Mark on call through modlook tags is a bit like leaving the class without a supply teacher, on the basis that if they start misbehaving somebody can go and fetch the headmaster.) She’s helped a lot more people on those forums than I have, or indeed Matt has. (Matt’s limited forum contributions consist primarily of locking threads and being rude to volunteers). OK, maybe gratitude is a bit much to ask, but a modicum of professionalism? For once? Please?

Have you learned nothing from the whole drmike mess about how to treat those who work for you? No? I’m sure there are courses you could go on. Something to think about for the new year.

Comments (38)

also, don’t you just love how they only add shit when support is shut?

September 22, 2007 at 4:49 pm · Filed under design, dot com, global tags, idiocy, Pontification, wank

As predicted, tags are here.

As could also have been predicted, they’re a mess.

Nobody has bothered to explain, either in the announcement or in the faq, whether the ‘global tags’ pages are going to be, in fact, global tags, or whether they are going to continue to be global categories (and change their name accordingly), or whether they are going to pull from both (and, if so, what they are going to do about duplicates). Nobody has bothered to explain whether tags get auto-submitted to technorati or whether this is still the job of categories. Apparently tags aren’t showing up in themes. Lorelle also tells us that post tag links will be internal but post category links will continue to be external. If true, this behaviour is precisely the opposite of what most users would expect: most of us would define a tag as an external, mob-folksonomical term which you use in order to connect with what other people have had to say on the same subject, whilst a category is a recurring topic within your own blog. I have no problem with my TAG links sending people to global TAGS. My category links, however, should stay within my blog.

Basically, because of the lazy way they tried to pass categories off as tags, they can’t now do a sensible, intuitive implementation of tags because it would take too much functionality away from categories. What would make most sense would be the option to automatically convert all categories on archive posts to tags which would link into the global TAGS system, and then let people decide whether they want to continue to use both, or just categories (keeping them out of global tags), or just tags (avoiding redundancy and page clutter).

I’d guess, though, that any such automated process would be far too great a weight for the servers to bear, even if people did have to choose to activate it. Plus, of course, making a clear distinction between categories and tags would a) draw attention to what a godawful mess the taggification of categories was and b) be insufficiently confusing for users. So that’s out.

So: is there any point in tags at all? I mean, presumably if they were getting fed to global tags or technorati surely they’d have mentioned that, as an incentive to get people to use them. But the notion of them being purely internal is boggling my brain, because that’s not what tagging is for. I have to conclude that they are here simply because they are in 2.3 and ignore them accordingly. Can I have an option to collapse the input field, please?

Comments (17)

bad words and maturity

February 17, 2007 at 5:21 pm · Filed under coppa schmoppa, dot com, forums, global tags, i am not a lawyer but..., idiocy, Pontification, wank

I was commenting on the whole censorship imbroglio over on adam’s blog t’other day (you missed this? erotica bloggers were bitching about being kicked out of the global tags system. I tend to think the best riposte to this would have been to ship their content, traffic, and all their friends to a more welcoming host and let wordpress.com become a kids ‘n’ Christians ghetto, if that’s what they want. Bitching a lot and slamming the door on my way out, obviously.) My line remains — it’s shouldn’t be up to wordpress.com to protect me from content they (or whatever random who clicked ‘flag as mature’) think is unsuitable by hiding it from my tag searches or keeping it out of my dashboard. It’s up to me to tell wordpress.com whether or not I want or need it to be hidden from me. Which naturally got me thinking about COPPA again, and the fact that Automattic doesn’t ask for reassurance that we’re over 13.

So here’s a thread and here’s another where drmike has to think fast and censor the age of the original poster. Because a disclosure that they were under 13 would automatically put wordpress.com in violation of COPPA for knowingly having users under the age of 13 and not requiring parental permission to keep their email addresses on file.

It’s nice that they have an experienced webmaster looking out for them on this, because left to themselves I’m not sure they’d have a clue. At the moment, they’re still got deniability. Yes, drmike knows there are users claiming to be under 13, and anyone reading the forum can surmise that there are users claiming to be under 13, but we’re not employees so it doesn’t matter. But the moment an irate parent comes along saying ‘why did you let my twelve-year-old daughter sign up to this pervert-ridden site without even asking her to lie about her age to do so?’, the game is up.

I’m not sure kids can be reasonably expected to understand or abide by this ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ age policy they have in operation here. And I am not especially happy about the fact that adults can’t choose for themselves what they can and cannot view in the shared spaces of wordpress.com because of a child audience that officially doesn’t exist. So please. Flag the users, not the blogs.

Comments (3)

where are the women, part 2789369132

January 31, 2007 at 10:57 pm · Filed under dot com, megalomania, pointy-headed fanatics, Pontification, wank

Me, leaping in to dispel the impression that Automattic is a woman-free zone? Wonders will never cease.

Although, if you will keep your sole female employee hidden on your corporate site while making public announcements about the appointment of pretty much all the others, you have to expect a little flack.

I can completely see why wordpress.com users unaware of the community issues with wordpress would be surprised by the lack of female faces. To them, Automattic’s just another 2.0 startup. They’re unaware of a context where women were getting involved, yes, but it was proving next to impossible to keep them involved. I wrote on some of the reasons for this last year, and I have nothing much to add to that; except that it’s become clearer in the intervening months that men are as alienated by the way the project’s run as women are. It’s just that women get switched off faster because they already know what not being listened to looks like, and it isn’t as much of a shock to them. The women who commented on that thread are testing Habari now. This is not a coincidence.

I don’t think Automattic should run out and hire a couple of token women because it would make them look better. They should think about whether it might be time to start hiring a few more people from outside the community, even if by doing so they ran the risk of them not understanding how things work around here. Because if they didn’t understand how things have always worked, then things might have to start working differently. And that might be good.

(In reality? If you don’t understand the way things work, you don’t last very long. Still, nice to dream.)

Comments (7)

maladjusted geeks

November 23, 2006 at 4:22 pm · Filed under forums, idiocy, Pontification, wank

Nice going WordPress. There has to be some kind of test you can give to your moderators to make sure the character glass is at least half full.

Well, I’m sure the policy of handing out moderator badges like sweeties to anyone who manages to stand the atmosphere in the .org forums longer than a week is now being rethought. It’s kind of sad that being a misogynist troll is in itself perfectly acceptable, and rambling badly-formatted emails boasting about your criminal record on the wp-forums list are also ok, and it’s only when you start hassling people who have come to the forums seeking help (and, incidentally, conspicuously failing to get any) that people finally twig that maybe giving you mod powers wasn’t such a fantastic idea after all. But it doesn’t surprise me, and it also helps to explain why it’s so hard to get people to stick around the .org forums longer than a week.

I am not for a moment arguing that people should be disqualified from helping on the forums because their personal sites are offensive and their social skills leave much to be desired (there’d be three people left, at most), just that maybe in future they shouldn’t be bribed with an official role. Even though in theory moderators should be held to a higher standard of behaviour, in practice some of the rudest and most unhelpful replies I’ve seen have been from mods. I’ve been saying for years that this sets the tone, and is why it’s so hard to get fresh volunteers; and this latest deterioration may or may not have something to do with the fact that the devs have abandoned free support like a sinking ship (Matt hasn’t posted in the .org forums for over two months, Ryan for nearly four).

If Codex ever gets some official love, maybe the next step should be getting someone to deal with the forums. And no, I don’t mean to faff about with bbPress making it look more like a shiny investor-impressing project than something Matt threw together in a weekend because his ego wouldn’t allow him to use someone else’s forum software. I mean making it look and act a bit more like a welcoming community resource and less like a hangout for maladjusted geeks.

Comments (16)

codex is dead. here are some suggestions on how to resurrect it.

November 10, 2006 at 3:14 pm · Filed under idiocy, megalomania, pointy-headed fanatics, Pontification, wank, wiki woes

This is one of those posts that started off as a comment and grew out of control, so for context, go here and come back when you’re done.

I did a bit of codex-related ranting on livejournal, I should probably import those posts 🙂 The fundamental problem is that documentation is far less suited to a collaborative open-source approach than code. To write decent documentation (which is more like a book than a piece of software) you need an editor/manager with a clear roadmap of what you’re trying to do and how it’s going to be accomplished; but as soon as someone steps up to the plate and starts laying down the law everyone else starts grumbling about how authoritarian they’re being, disagreeing with their ideas, and generally focusing more on internal politics than getting the job done. Result? Bruised egos and chaotic docs.

If Matt genuinely cared about documentation, he’d have appointed a decent technical writer at the outset to oversee the project and get things organised. People are much more willing to accept the authority of official leaders than self-appointed ones. In the early days of the Codex I got tired of my contributions being mangled by fellow contributors who couldn’t even spell right and were obviously just desperate to get their fingerprints on every page they could (you could say that’s the nature of wikis, but that’s why wikis need managing by people who know what they’re doing). Later on, it became pretty clear that newcomers weren’t welcome and the whole thing had degenerated into an egofest. Meanwhile, if I want up-to-date information on a template function my best bet remains to go directly to the code, just as I had to in the days of 0.72. There’s no way codex can keep pace with development when there’s zero communication between developers and documentors and the devs have abandoned it in order to focus on sexier, more lucrative projects.

Best thing to do? Freeze contributions from the general public. Hire someone to sift through what we have. Keep the useful stuff (by this I mean actual documentation that people can access from their admin pages, not half-baked tutorials which would be better off on a subdomain of wordpress.net). Go through the useful stuff and ensure it’s still useful. Rewrite. Restructure. Tag stuff. (I put that suggestion in there in the hope of getting Matt interested, rather than any great belief in its codex-saving powers. But it may be useful, and should be done). Re-open the wiki with a call for volunteers and a set of rules for them to abide by. Focus on documenting everything in 2.5. Then the wordpresstutorials.com groupies we met in the last post and its surrounding wank will have less compelling arguments for the necessity of their illustrious sponsor, and wordpress will look a fair bit more professional.

It will not be quick, and it will not be easy, and the temptation must be to junk it like the original wiki and start again on yet another subdomain. If any part of wordpress needed a benevolent dictator, it was the docs. It’s a shame it never had one.

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