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I’ve been working on something. It’ll be live soon and it’s a whole new direction. More soon.
On a side-note — filed under the special-things-that-turn-one-homicidal category — something was slightly h0rked after a recent hosting upgrade. I think I’ve nailed it now. Mostly.
“Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?”
Worth mentioning at this point, is my natural hatred when it comes to moving Wordpress — the database is very fragile and entirely prone to crash. It’s worse when months of backups all share the same flaw that was exposed during the move and db server upgrade. Upshot?
Always have a plan D, for when A and B and C all crash and burn.
Joen, a smart chap whom I read quite diligently perhaps passes the comment of the week:
Usability is not a Jackson Pollock painting.
Whilst Joen argues that Wordpress is the single best blogging platform out there, and to be fair his comments are true to an extent, it does suffer mix of legacy design elements with an assortment of new css-slicing techniques that result in a UI challenged (at best) product.
The interface is, quite frankly, shocking. Traversing the UI isn’t a fun process — and the less spoken of the template engine and it’s propensity to mix structure and presentation, the better. It’s not uncommon to hear the phrase “it should not be this hard” within the community.
The demo Joen points to is a classic example of why the Wordpress developers just don’t seem to “get” the idea of smart UI design — repeated vertical scrolling just to post and or edit an entry isn’t the bastion of great design.
The community has attempted to help out in the past and received little more than passing interest — amusingly whilst there is now some hint of ’shuttle’ in the 2.3.x releases, it’s at best a passing shadow of what could have been. Without a solid commitment to get it right, Wordpress will always be an ungainly and navigationally challenged beast.
Whilst
Habari may have been a haven for ex-Wordpress developers, it’s yet to really gain any traction. One wonders what would have been if the same creative and design flair had been welcomed by the Wordpress project team instead of the litany of excuses reasons why it’s always just too hard.
Joen writes that he has released Fauna 1.0:
“Several years of development by a committed team. All wrapped up and final. Compatible with all the best plugins, and the newest Wordpress.”
Fauna is a well engineered and smart theme by an amazing graphic artist.
Mr Mullenweg outlines what the WP.com Marketplace concept entails:
At the end of the day, it’s just a market. I’m sure styles, pricing strategies, and more will develop over time.
Themes would be on sale to wordpress.com users, free to self-install users (care of the GPL) and would split income to both developer and Automattic alike. Although it’s hardly surprising people are a tad polarised on the topic.
Given there are a number of add-on options already on sale, themery will merely add to the existing pay-per-view line-up strengthening the .com brand, via strong value add — hardly a malicious act in of itself.
A recent entry over at The Blog Herald by David Peralty, seems to be polarising views somewhat:
Creating such a marketplace, to me, is basically saying that no themes can make money, unless Matt is getting a cut of the proceeds, and that doesn’t seem right.
It’s really not about the money, even if Matt sends occasional mixed signals. Nor does the latest yet-to-be-launched product out of the Automattic stables, have anything to do with theme sponsorship.
Rather it is clear that Matt is very strongly committed to product and brand control. Recent trends towards the strong commercialisation of wordpress.com and the GPL’d self-install Wordpress itself to an extent do illustrate that clearly.
I’m about done.
I have updated
broadleaf for the last time1 as the time and resources required to keep the theme current are a little exhaustive. Recent changes in Wordpress table construction has meant a total re-write of the theme code handling posts.
It now uses a conditional query statement that should work under either 2.2.x […]
Wordpress has been a great friend for nearly four years. In that time it has been an amazing teacher, student, adversary and in some ways, confidant.
But of late it’s been getting a lot harder to do simple things. Like aggregate links1 as articles, handle categories and tags2 in a sane-and-useful manner, pull entries out of […]
There is something about
Tumblr that has me deeply involved in a love-hate tryst. Absolute hate and love with the strongest of passions.
It’s utter and total simplicity makes virtually every other blog platform I’ve ever looked at, or tried1 feel like trying to work out the mathematics to form a wormhole in space-and-time by comparison.
Take […]
"I’ve been using it [sig2feed] for my Secret Links feature, which only people who subscribe to my RSS feed can see." — a creative and smart use of my RSS Signature plugin.
“.. 2.3 introduces our new taxonomy schema. This new schema replaces the categories, post2cat, and link2cat tables with three new tables that are more flexible.” — core db changes will impact a large number of plugins, increasing the upgrade gulf between versions as a result.
If you are a
text-link-ads publisher and provide a canvas for the display of fine hypertext wares via the tla wordpress plugin, might I point out a small, but somewhat pivotal part of the process. Within the wp-options table is the row tla_last_update.
This little beasty stores the surprisingly boring yet none-the-less critical-for-functionality last update time […]
