August 12, 2008 at 2:32 pm
· Filed under coppa schmoppa, design, dot com, forums, megalomania
I observe that Matt is compensating for the loss of his beloved default blogroll by sneaking a link to his blog into the footer of wordpress.com:
Cute. He’s got couple of years at most before people cease to find his obsession with being #1 in Google endearing and start to think it sad (it is rather adolescent, after all), so he might as well optimise while the sun shines.
Also, they have done away with the stupid faux-blog design of the forums and made the fonts teeny-tiny to further discourage participation by anyone over the age of fourteen. Yay!
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August 4, 2008 at 4:53 am
· Filed under Pontification, dot com, forums, global tags, 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.
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July 30, 2008 at 7:37 pm
· Filed under design, idiocy, monkeys saying BOO!, wank
I poked my head around the door of the attempt at an official theme repository, and, well, you know me, I’m no good at keeping things in the respectable obscurity of censored comments and feedback forms:
Theme tags don’t paginate properly. http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/tags/fixed-width/page/2 throws a 404, making it unnecessarily difficult to browse themes. Either scrap the page links or make them work. My preference is for the latter, as ideally I would like to be able to view more than 15 themes in any given category.
Also, as I’m sure you’re aware, search results display diagonally rather than vertically or even horizontally (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/search.php?q=widgets). I applaud your willingness to try new ways of presenting information, but on the other hand it does look depressingly like somebody forgot to clear their floats.
If I were logged in on my usual account there’d be screenshots and debugging. Sigh.
I am not normally this snarky in my bug reports, but a) they had a year to get this right, b) it’s a part of the site used by designers, and not bothering to test whether your own design functions properly is sort of rude, to be honest, as it betrays once more how very little you care about their vocation and c) I can’t view more than fifteen themes in any given category?!? are you real?
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July 28, 2008 at 3:14 am
· Filed under dot com, free beer fundamentalists, kicking baby squirrels, pointy-headed fanatics, wank
Lloyd is sad, because the cool kids at Six Apart and OpenID are having some sort of open-source standards-inventing party and Automattic weren’t invited.
Well, maybe they remembered Matt’s reluctance to support Atom 1.0? Or took note of his failure to provide any specs for the WXR export format and assumed he wouldn’t be interested in their venture? Just a thought.
I kind of love how the fanboys in that thread protest that it doesn’t need a spec because it was only ever intended to be used for ferrying content between WP installations anyway. (Who would ever deviate from the One True Path and switch to another application?) It reminds me a lot of how Matt refused for years to include any export features at all, because he thought it was the sole responsibility of whichever tool you were adopting to get your data out of his software and into theirs. Database dumps were considered a perfectly adequate form of export until wordpress.com arrived; if this place had never been invented, WXR would not exist. It’s not a standard. It’s a makeshift solution to the problem of shifting data from .com blogs to .org installs, and nobody at Automattic believes in it enough, or cares enough about data portability, to bother polishing or promoting it.
I have little doubt that the MT export format is technically inferior to WXR (I wouldn’t know, my head’s not that pointy yet), but it became a de facto standard because they documented it and encouraged people to use it. Back in the day, someone wrote a nifty little program to export Diaryland entries in MT format, and I used it to import a year’s worth of posts into WordPress. That didn’t benefit Six Apart directly, but it certainly benefited me. I think that’s probably what they mean by openness.
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July 18, 2008 at 7:47 pm
· Filed under design, free beer fundamentalists, idiocy, megalomania, wank
It being over a year since the senseless killing of themes.wordpress.net, Automattic have thrown up some content at extend/themes in a vain attempt to stop people bitching about it.
I say ’some content’.
Three themes.
[laughs for two minutes straight.]
They couldn’t even be bothered to include the ones they’re using on wordpress.com. There’s the photoblog one by Matt’s pet designer friend, the inevitable Prologue, and Tarski. The authors of that one must have handed development over to Automattic, or maybe they’ve just been doing so much inhouse mutilation they think it constitutes a new theme.
The so-called preview blog has evidently been thrown together in four minutes. It doesn’t have blockquotes, it doesn’t have an entry truncated with <!- -more- ->, it doesn’t have multiple pages (let alone child pages), it doesn’t have any trackbacks or pingbacks, it doesn’t have an oversized image, it doesn’t have any links in comments, it doesn’t have a password-protected post… I could go on, but I’m sure you’re getting bored.
Oh, and naturally your theme will have to get past the Great Firewall of Matt, so unless you’re a personal friend of his I wouldn’t bother uploading anything. Well, you could try, just don’t expect it to be published before Christmas. He’s a busy guy.
As for the requirements, it’s more important to include a version number than to ensure your theme supports the current version of WP. (This is perhaps understandable, since Prologue apparently breaks in 2.6). You don’t even have to include widgets, let alone tags or gravatars. As for valid xhtml or CSS, this is not important either. It doesn’t have to work in multiple browsers or resolutions. Basically you can upload any crap you like, as long as it doesn’t have sponsored links in it and you don’t demand people keep your linkback. Because vanity links are sooo much more evil than broken layouts 
So yeah, another one-fingered salute to theme designers and users. Somehow, I doubt the likes of wpthemesfree will be quaking in their boots.
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July 13, 2008 at 9:07 pm
· Filed under bananas, dot com, forums, global tags, idiocy, megalomania
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.
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July 11, 2008 at 12:04 am
· Filed under Pontification, bananas, bubble, free beer fundamentalists, megalomania, 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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July 7, 2008 at 2:02 pm
· Filed under design, dot com, forums, speculation, wank
There are so many responses by bubel on the forums about how you absolutely can NOT use your own themes on wordpress.com that not only am I now convinced the theme marketplace has finally been shelved but I’m starting to think custom CSS must be on the way out as well 
This user wanting multiple themes on the same blog, for example, could have been profitably directed to Sandbox, where anyone with a fair degree of CSS competency can achieve different looks for different types of pages. If it was a volunteer giving that answer, I’d just shrug my shoulders and assume they didn’t know what can be achieved with the CSS upgrade, but if it’s staff you have to assume that they have some other reason for not mentioning it.
This sucks, as I was seriously thinking of offering custom custom CSS skins for a small fee even though such services are officially discouraged. Ah well. I should really apply my efforts to learning Drupal instead.
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June 25, 2008 at 7:11 pm
· Filed under bubble, dot com, forums, wank
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June 23, 2008 at 5:03 pm
· Filed under coppa schmoppa, dot com, forums, monkeys saying BOO!, wank
In case you missed today’s bout of penguin spam, I’ve archived it for your viewing pleasure here. If you or your family live in the US and have been personally affected by the issue of allowing children to blog here without parental consent, you may be interested to learn that the FTC have made it much easier to file a complaint about COPPA violations. If you are a staff member of Automattic, they have produced a useful checklist to help you comply with US data protection law and pre-empt any such complaints here.
Perhaps once they have ensured that they’re not going to get hammered with a fine they will be less afraid to deal with children when they misbehave. Right now, when they ban a child they run the risk that they or their disgruntled parents are going to grass them up and let them in for a world of pain. Taking personally identifying information from children and claiming to be unable to delete it? Inadvertent pron on kiddy dashboards? Ads for dating agencies on kiddy blogs? World. Of. Pain. It’s a good thing that penguins and their guardians are neither that smart nor that malicious.
(I’m also not wholly convinced that ‘your mom!‘ is an especially constructive approach to take towards trollkids, but if staff think it’s acceptable who am I to argue?)
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