archGFX » greed

Buckshot Ep. 7

adam — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:00:14 +0000

What is it the new winamp reminds me of? oh yeah, the open source product of one of the original winamp guys, Songbird. Except even with all it's podcatching and blog-reading capabilities, it still tries to manage my music collection, rather than just indexing it. so while songbird finds my new music in a couple minutes, winamp still chokes on the import, and I wind up dragging folders into the now playing window anyway. Open Source FTW.
from the Apple Sucks Department: Tuesday, my wife picked up her ibook from apple's genius bar. Wednesday, I went to pick up a new power cord from microcenter. Why? the genius bar has this policy that anything you leave on their counter, or that isn't itemized on the intake manifest, they can't return to you. Never mind that last time, it was the iSkin that we didn't see whether they listed on the manifest, or that the ~~idiot~~ "genius" set the power cord out of sight when testing the power connection with his own cable. If you think I'm being harsh on apple, imagine if this was an auto mechanic, and we were discussing a custom gear shift knob. 1 .

I've worked in an auto shop, and we made damn sure that if a customer left something on the counter, it got attached to the work order or left in the vehicle. This is evidently too much work for geniuses.

Christmas Nachos

adam — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 13:22:11 +0000

More and more, it's looking like the reasons for matt disliking barthelme had less to do with the link in the footer, than some personal dislike. i say this because it's christmas. and my brand new christmas theme has a footer link to a very sploggy looking christmas site. the link in my dashboard is a to a subdomain with information about the theme.

Now, granted, christmas is about as ad-ridden and commercial as holidays come. But if it's ok to choose a theme with a link like this, and leave the link in the footer, then surely it would have been ok to install barthelme, and remove the link to flower delivery? At least with Scott, we know who he is. Keith (of amazing christmas ideas) was too scared of being linked to his splog, so he registered with domainsbyproxy.com.

I suspect that the real issue is that it would've been too difficult to re-write Ozh's theme toolkit from scratch, so that barthelme's fantastic font options would be available to wordpress.com users.

via Blogger's Blurt.

Garland: A Chronology in Point Form

adam — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 01:37:49 +0000

wordpress.com releases custom CSS as a paid upgrade
forseeing themes with options becoming rarer on wordpress.com, (they might detract from custom CSS sales), i suggest that an alternative upgrade to custom CSS could be the addition of themes that include color pickers.
matt notices the new default drupal theme, gets mesmerized by the ~~big blue header~~ color picker, and asks someone to port it to wordpress, ahead of the new drupal release.
wordpress hackers tell him this dilutes branding, makes wordpress look unoriginal, and is generally bad form.
one of matt's employees emails the drupal developer asking for permission to port the theme (courtesy on top of license grants). drupal developer echoes what the wp-hackers said, asking said employee not to port the theme, at least until after drupal 5 is released.
that employee is terminated.
another automattic employee, (who doesn't ask) grabs the pre-release code and ports the theme to wordpress.com, although doesn't bother styling many of the elements lorelle considers core competency, nor dealing with image widths. the theme is also structurally incorrect, despite wordpress' claims to be 'a semantic publishing platform'.
the drupal developer calls matt out on his lack of ethics.
matt suggests trying to put the genie back in the bottle (1st comment on last link)
wordpress.com users wonder if using the theme is a breach of ethics, or if now that matt's already thrown ethics out the window, they might as well, since they can.
matt tells wordpress.com users to get the theme while they can, because he's going to try to save face by turning off the theme in a few ~~eons of internet time~~ days.

Post Script

The Fanboys declare that matt is 'doing the right thing', despite the fact that the theme is still available on wp.com
Garland developers ask wordpress.com users to stop using garland, since matt doesn't seem to be doing what he said/they asked.
Matt disables garland for new blogs. any of the 500,000+ users who already have accounts, however, can continue to switch to garland at their leasure.

in which it becomes clear that scoble is, in fact, a freeloader.

adam — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 13:01:30 +0000

You're a VIP, and you're still not happy? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

Seriously, you already got a custom template, and the right to run ads on a service that no one else does, and you want more?

I mean, there are people asking for this stuff every day on the forums. but they didn't get a sweet deal from matt. they got face value, possibly before there was even so much as a TOS.

They don't have the ability to change their template files, but they can buy a CSS upgrade. Components from other web companies? did you mean like meebo? or like flickr? del.icio.us? or perhaps you have an RSS feed you'd like to display?

wordpress.com stops you short in one place, and one place only. javascript. (well, flash too, but i've seen few complaints about that). the only reason you think that javascript is a limitation is because the host of a million splogs lets you add them. And you see where that got them. It's not a new limitation to the million of mypace users. or livejournal users. or xanga users. or msn spaces users.

so, yes, robert, i'd choose wordpress.com for any blog for myself or any of my friends. it's got the horsepower under the hood, without the stigma of being a dramafest for teenage girls. But then, I know more CSS tricks than most folks. and the flexibility of the sandbox is lost on those who don't.