Is This Thing On?

Nov 17, 2008 · psu · 3 minute read
Web

Psst? Anyone there?

It appears that after a bit of technical chaos and angst that we are back. In a slight breach of protocol I’m going to spend a bit of time sending a big raspberry to the “developers” who create the wonderful weblog publishing software that we spend so much of our time using.

Take the Wordpress upgrade and migration scheme. Please.

It’s not clear to me who thinks that this is a well designed process. Here is how upgrade works:

1. Replace your current install with the new install.

2. Make all of your customizations again by hand.

3. Upgrade your database and pray that something doesn’t get irreversibly destroyed.

Who thinks that this is anything but a poor retarded excuse for a technical solution?

Migration is a similar hassle. You copy everything to the new server by hand, import the database and then try to test it. And… you get redirected to your old server, which you left up until you are sure things are working. This is because the mental midgets at Wordpress put some critical server configuration data in the database which causes this redirection to happen. Therefore, without hand surgery to the database, you can’t run a live and staging server at the same time while you migrate. This makes it a bit hard to test the new server.

Of course, I should not really blame Wordpress, because their competition is no better, and usually worse. We switched to Wordpress a while back in the first place because the previous system could not even restore itself from a native data format dump of the entire weblog. So everything is relative.

Weblog software is a strange beast. It is strange because so many relatively naive end users use the software, and yet the software itself is so bad. You really have to wonder about a software segment where every single desktop posting client is actually more painful to use than just connecting to the web server and typing in the little text areas. For example, are there any desktop clients on the Mac that let you post drafts to the server and then let you edit them conveniently with your writing partner? No? This situation is like some kind of genius level of brain damage that deserves recognition.

And speaking of the text areas: here is a plea to web developers everywhere. Stop stealing my god damned key bindings in text areas. I do not want Ctrl-e or Ctrl-p or Ctrl-a to do your pet little thing. I want them to do my pet little thing. I need those keys to act like Emacs, lest my brain melt.

Thanks for your time. More regular programming on this channel when I get done playing Fallout 3.