smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

This week I am reminded, again, why I’m beginning to find the wordpress community distasteful in it’s propensity to defend the honour of Wordpress, without taking the time to listen to the common punter and indeed get the details right.

Whilst Lorelle has thoughtfully provided a great upgrade guide, she does have these kind words for anyone who follows the actual upgrade advice for Wordpress 2.1:

In other words, if you didn’t follow the instructions right, why blame WordPress? Follow them and they work.

That’s a fair call, as is the following:

Support volunteers provide these instructions on the WordPress Codex, on the forum, and all over the place. Then these same volunteers spend hours and hours saying, “Did you follow the upgrade instructions?� “No. I uploaded the files over the old ones.�

Great response there Lorelle, but have you checked the instructions before making that claim?

“Follow the instructions by deleting then uploading…� So if my wording caught someone’s attention, maybe a volunteer might repeat themselves one less time.

That’s great - only the codex doesn’t agree with you, in regards to instructions for upgrading. Anyone who overwrites files as part of the Wordpress 2.1 upgrade process, is following the instructions.

Step 3: Overwrite Files

Get the latest and greatest WordPress (http://wordpress.org/download) and upload it to the WordPress directory, overwriting all the files that exist there (do not overwrite your wp-content directory or wp-config.php).

So yes, if you follow the above, then Lorelle suggests you don’t actually follow the instructions to overwrite, despite the fact that they are, indeed, the instructions and that it’s not the fault of WP if it all goes south for the winter.

Indeed the codex only recommends a partial deletion as a last resort.

And my entries entire point? The problem with leaping to the defence of a project, without first listening to the initial comment, is that one misses somewhat vital details. When instructions tell people one thing — don’t smash them in the face with a trite doctrine of “it’s your fault, you didn’t follow the instructions did you? so do this”.. when not everyone is a geek, guru or net savant.

Whilst many geeks are bloggers, not all bloggers are geeks. It’s worth remembering that WP is used by a varied community, not all of whom are going to be aware that the instructions above, despite being quite clear, may not always be 100% the best option.

Sure, I agree there are times when overwriting is a bad idea as an upgrade path — for example if files are set read only¹ or the upgrade files are incomplete for whatever reason and create cross version contamination².

But in many cases — it works just fine, hence why the instructions clearly indicate it. Having a full backup and disabling plugins are really the only two highly important steps. If an overwrite doesn’t work - then “clearing the slate”, so to speak, will work wonders.

Normally, I wouldn’t get drawn into creating an entry such as this, but seriously, no offence, but quit with the holy quest to defend the honour of WP and listen to people when they speak, before jumping to conclusions about what you think is being said.

1. .. and thus aren’t replaced (↩)
2. .. i.e. when the files end up in a mess with some remaining from the previous version, along with the new version (↩)

Performancing’s Nick Wilson has recently announced that CPA advertising is now in place to ‘backfill’ advertising where no advertising orders have occurred:

“We’ve just finished inputing the promised first round of CPA (cost per action) ads into the beta “Network Ads” program to backfill unsold ad space across the Partners network.”

“Right now they are very broad in topic, as this is simply a test (but a test with the aim of making you money..), but presuming all goes to plan, we’ll roll out more creatives and more specific targeting in coming days.”

So, as you can see to the right of this entry, now sports some colourful advertising. Of dating services. Great. Did someone say broad? I need to have my hearing tested. Or my eyesight. Perhaps both.

You have to be kidding me.. before I begin, this post may contain content that might be offensive to advertisers and small children..
Evolutionary theft
So not only is bitacle.org cramming advertising into every spare pixel, they’ve now added ‘digg this’ to their every-evolving quest to squeeze every last cent out of ’stolen’ content.

Now, whilst you might […]

Does this look at all familiar?
If you thought it was only ever the
uber-popular kids on the block that have
content scraped, without permission and then used to make money without the blog author’s knowledge - you would be wrong.
The art of
splogging is nothing new — spam comments and advertising attempting to pretend it’s […]

I’ve come to a fork() in the operating System road.
Indeed.. I’m not entirely sure I wish to install another Microsoft Operating System product, again.. ever.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself. You see, late last night I decided to free up some previously assigned space on my workstations SATA drive. Not a big deal really and […]

Whatever have you done to the wordpress.org
search, Mr
Matt ‘wordpress’ Mullenweg? It’s so very badly broken.
Once upon a time, in place not so far away, one could spend quite the merry sunny afternoon or cool winters evening searching
the codex for all manner of code goodies.. but not today.
Oh how I long for […]

After checking up on the results
latest wordpress 2.x theme competition (yet to be judged) I read the entries are being posted to
the wordpress theme viewer.
I cannot believe the numbers of people passing off
openwebdesign layouts or clones of existing themes, as their own. If you’re going to rip off somebody’s work1 - […]

Please, if you are one of the millions of unthinking lemmings who insist on a daily ‘daily links’ post ((
This, of course, should not be confused with ’shorts’ or ‘asides’
- i.e. concise entries with a single specific point, resource or topic.)), stop.
A number of the RSS feeds I read daily, have just been deleted out […]

I do not visit slashdot.org any more.

And now a short message for those who seek to spam, or leave ‘advertiser’ comments - !@&#$ off.