Art of Blogging

Obviously, I have hit the end of my rope with WordPress.

However, I am not ready to go work at some fast food place, so I have to come up with something.

I looked into Habari again and rather deeply. I have to say, it looks like they are doing some really good work and trying hard not to make mistakes that have been made before. Unfortunately, their ideas for what a blog should do are not the same as my ideas. Mostly, this is just a matter of taste, except for one major detail.

It seems they think it is a bad idea for blogs to be indexed by Search Engines and do some things to stop the SE’s from coming along and indexing. One of these things is stopping the blog from pinging Google et al. While I can see their point, I vehemently disagree.

I think unless you are making something truly private, EVERYTHING should be indexed.

One reason is because I am a marketer, and not a blogger. I want new people to find my stuff and not just the established blog community.

Another reason is due to how I use the web myself. For instance, for right or wrong, I do not go trawling Digg and the like for stuff to read and learn. I use Google. Every blog I have ever found has been through either Google or link travels.

Why would I want to do something that would make my personal methods of travel no longer work?

OK, I may very well be missing the point and have failed to do my homework fully, but this isnt my major reason for not trying Habari out at this time… my major reason is this blog network we are on right now.

I have a few such networks and Habari isnt set up to handle them the way MU tries to.

This isn’t a flaw with Habari, just a different set of priorities between what the developers want and what I want.

Again, I briefly looked into what it would take to roll my own blog script… I am pretty sure I could hack up something that would do what I needed and be fairly secure. I could even get it up and running in a fairly reasonable amount of time… say 6 months or so and it would do what I needed.

Seeing as how this blog network is easily a YEAR behind schedule due to personal reasons and dicking with WordPress and their inanities, that is not an option.

I started looking again at other options available to me in the pre-rolled realm.

The old school big hitter in the blog network arena is Movable Type. Sorry, I am not going to pay for it. If I wanted to pay for a blog engine, I would roll my own.

This sounds awfully callous of me, I know, but it is actually more a matter of cynicism. I have no real confidence in any code I didnt write or control the development of. There is always *something* that other devs do that I do not approve of. This means I have to hack and slash the code. If they make me pay, the license is far too restrictive for my purposes.

Also, I “pay” for the use of code by teaching others how to use it. This is my personal business model and ethical thinking… and I also am not unknown to make a donation to a project out side of my normal writing.

If MT was open sourced and free, they would get me as a user and would get far more value than their licensing fees… and odds are, they would get more actual cash out of me too.

On with the body count.

I looked at several other alternatives as well, but none of them even remotely looked like they would make me happy. Since most of those reasons are personal bias and NOT my thinking they were junk I wont go into the big long list.

What I am about to install and try out is LifeType.

LifeType is an Open Source multi-user, multi-blog platform.

It is not a hacked up abortion like WordPress MU is. LifeType is designed out of the box to run either one blog or hundreds of blogs.

To me, this is the proper approach to making a script of this nature.

A minor but important point is that the group doesn’t seem to have a problem saying they made a mistake.

For example, their current release comments are:

“Lifetype 1.2.6 is the latest maintenance release of the 1.2 branch and though we said that 1.2.5 was “as rock-solid as it gets”, there continued to be a number of improvements and at least one significant bug fix.”

Guess it wasn’t quit as rock solid as they thought.

That is the problem with bold words like that…. too much code to be able to say anything is perfect.

Least they ate their serving of crow and did the right thing rather than sweeping it under the rug until the next release version.

It seems that I can migrate the existing WP DB over to LifeType. If so, I will be publishing the slew of back logged articles I have here on WP and WP MU purely for archive purposes (and to not waste the content that I created) and we will continue as previously planned at this blog.

At this point, I have only uploaded the code to a test location and not started the installation, so this post itself counts as bold words on my part.

Wish me luck, I am going in!

No.

Why not?

Because I spend all my time hacking and trying to fix WordPress. My God, this is some AWFUL FUCKING CODE!

WordPress devs should be ashamed.

Pure and simple.

I actually hate them and their arrogance.

I am sure there are at least a couple who are smart and educated and humble, but the whole project is just ruined by the mentality of the top end.

Why am I pissed off?

Well, let’s see…. to start with, in order for this blog to function the memory allowed to be used by php has had to been increased to 64 MB. That is OBSCENE. Good Fucking thing I have dedicated servers or my blog network would get me terminated from my hosting.

Next, I have spent a great deal of time figuring out which plugins I need and how to use them. In one fell upgrade, most of them no longer work. Many labor hours have been wasted.

Which ones? The good ones, of course. Why did they fail? Well, let’s take Ultimate Tag Warrior for a case point. UTW3 no longer works on WP because those COCKSUCKERS decided that it was a cool feature so they would make it native. Ok, all fine and good on a user side… we wont get into how WP just told ANOTHER of their best plugin developers to fuck off… but not only did they appropriate the tags, but they did a typically LAME job of it. The WP tag system is a toy compared to UTW. Something that worked and worked well no longer even functions. I am sure I could spend some time on the web and find out what lines of WP abortive code needs to be hacked out, but I am sorry, I am working here.

I don’t have the time to go through and fix these ASSHOLE’S lame work. I now MUST find an alternative to WordPress because in hubris they have ruined something that worked… yet again.

This is my site, my server, my network… and yet, I am forbidden from running php on my pages because the devs were too lazy to learn how to make kses work for them and they just hacked out all the ability for using things like CSS and php. Even worse, they say they “wont fix” it. what FLOORS me on kses is that they took the time to go through and hack kses all up so that it is a bastardized version and using the standard kses is just not a practical option anymore.

The themes system for WordPress is equally as disgusting as their code base.

I can’t even get this crap code to fake it and perform properly on the whole… and as soon as I do get one area working right, they release another “upgrade” that undoes all my previous work and the learning curve begins again. What the FUCK do these ass munches use for brains?

And to be clear, there are many good and skilled people giving their time for free to WordPress, but they are getting fucked over by the whole project. Frankly, you volunteers should all just stop. Give your time to someone who appreciates it and wont slice your throat as soon as you make something cool.

I applaud your efforts, but I think they are being wasted. It is your time though, so feel free to just think I am an idiot.

WordPress, you and Automattic can just kiss my ass. I am going to a far simpler framework so that I can spend my time actually producing content and not baby sitting this CRAP code.

I despise you for being part of what makes the web suck.

Even Microsoft doesn’t shit on their users this badly.

Hopefully, I will be able to migrate the work I have done here to whatever new engine I come up with, but there is no telling…. also, I have lost a lot of my interest in trying to help the blogging community because you all allow WordPress to do what they are doing.

I have a ton of stuff I wrote about plugins here in my queue, but never got to actually publish them because WordPress kept changing the rules and breaking stuff.

What a waste of time and effort.

Oh, for the record, I have a few dozen blogs on various networks that have been dealing with this WordPress nightmare. It is just not economically feasible for me to cope with this anymore.

There will be no more installs of WordPress on my network.

Fucking scrapers are easier to setup and maintain.

(Edited… Lesson to other bloggers: when you are angry and posting a rant, take a break from it before you hit publish. I am sorry for the two paragraphs that were originally here, they were inappropriate and just temper speaking. I apologize to those that saw what was here before I came to my senses and realized I was just being mean. Please notice that I am not removing a lot of other harsh and colorful words from this post.)

Sadly, my choice in blog engines has lead to the demise of my blogs.

I could rant like this for hundreds of pages, but I have work to do and no more time for WordPress. I am going to try and get my attitude together and then install Habari… I hope it isn’t junk.

Fuck you, Automattic!

Now that AdSense ads are actually running, I might as well explain how it was done.

Yeah, I know, these Howto’s are boring and not much fun. Trust me, they aren’t much fun to write either. Soon, I will be done with most of them and will get down to the real work.

They sure do take out a lot of the guess work on setting up a new blog though.

The purpose of this article is only to discuss the actual installation of this plugin on my WordPress MU site. Actually using the AdSense plugin is the subject of other articles.

The first one I am using is AdSense Deluxe. Unfortunately, their site seems to have been deleted, so I wont add a link. I did find a copy of this plugin for download that is a patched version. Unfortunately, I closed the window too soon and I lost the link. Sorry to the author of the patch. If you contact me, I will give you credit. I am such a bad blogger.

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I have mentioned comments are important and should be encouraged before, right? Pretty sure I have said something or another about the importance of comments and how to make you commentators feel special at least once or twice.

JohnTP has a list of the Top 5 WordPress Plugins That Help Increase Comments. I already use a couple on this list and agree with the rest.

I won’t go into a lot of detail here but I will run down the list quickly since they are all aimed at normal WordPress and I use WordPress MU (at least for now).

I will add a couple to the list though.

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Want a way to ping Google?

Yeah, I thought that would get your attention.

Go get the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin and put it in and within minutes, you can be pinging Google every time you make a post.

As a bonus, Yahoo! and MSN use the same sitemap structure. Anything that calls Search Engines to index your sites is a good SEO tool.

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Tag Clouds according to Wikipedia: “A tag cloud (more traditionally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical… Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.”

For a live example of them, take a look at the end of this post and also on the bottom of my sidebar.php.

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I will speak regularly on the importance of comments to a blog, I am sure. Today, I am going to keep it basic.

Comments are part of what makes blogs such a successful method to convey ideas. They are also a major part in that new-fangled Web 2.0 stuff.

Since blog comments are important, the people making them are important too, right?

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WordPress has all sorts of plugins. Loads and loads of them. A lot of work is put into them, both on the development side and the utilization side. Usually, they are nice and slick.

Sometimes, that is just too much to hope for. Lately, it is even getting worse and only exacerbated by my using the WordPress MU engine.

Sometimes, a simple and crude hack is a better solution.

IMNHO, here is such a hack.

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The other night I decided I needed to have some php run from my posts now and again. I started doing the “normal” WordPress thing and messing with plugins and seeing which worked on WPMU and which did not.

This went typically… find the plugin, install the plugin, watch it blow up, remove the plugin, find the next one, modify WPMU configuration so it works… hack hack hack…

I finally found a couple that worked and I will write them up soon.

Except…

When I put the php code in my post and hit save, it just vanished.

O_o

My first thought was, “gee, how STUPID!”

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WYSIWYG editors suck.

The WordPress WYSIWYG editor is extra noxious.

To kill its vileness, it takes some poking around. Specially since it is in a non-intuitive place.

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