Why WordPress is So Popular In Spite of Itself

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I got an email from Sitepoint this morning the subject line of which was “Why is WordPress So Popular?” I was intrigued so I opened it (I open most of their email, actually…great group!). Turned out the topic wasn’t WordPress per se but a book they published on building WordPress themes.

But the question was intriguing anyway so I thought about it for a bit. There are a lot of things to like about WordPress. But I have a hard time with people who think it’s the Ultimate Web Development Panacea. In reality, it’s a very good content management system augmented by tons of well-designed plug-ins that enable you to cobble together something relatively usable with relatively little programming effort. But like all such tools of which I’m aware, it has huge walls at some points. For example, changing not just the UI but the UX is very challenging for most WP users and designers (though somewhat less so for developers). If you need custom DB access in, e.g., a Web app, WP is not likely to be easy to bend to your will.
But I digress.
The singular most important advantage I think WordPress has over its competitors from a technology perspective is its high level of granularity. It is so relatively easy to add major chunks of functionality to your site with plug-ins. For example, eCommerce, full-blown membership site infrastructure, and a few dozen other such things are ready to drop in. They integrate nicely and for the most part relatively easily. If you want or need to custom-tailor them, that’s sometimes a real challenge.
For my money, though, I’m still using NOLOH for everything except heavily CMS-driven sites and I’ll soon be using NOLOH for those, too. It’s a matter of waiting for the NOLOH development team to put together some good editors for their in-place-editing CMS model, which I find vastly superior to and more efficient than the wizard-driven editor approach of WP and other CMSes. No walls. Growing community (though it will probably never be as big as WP’s, which is the latter’s other big advantage).

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

August 31, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Maybe Post Formatting is WordPress’ Fault, Not Posterous

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I've posted a couple of comments here in recent weeks griping about the fact that when I use email to post to my blog via Posterous, formatting gets munged. In almost all cases, e.g.,. the blank line between the first and second paragraphs gets eliminated. I know that's probably not a big deal to more than a handful of folks on the planet, but for better or for worse, I've spent so much of my life as a professional writer and publisher, that the formatting errors just bug me.

This morning I decided to probe more deeply into what's going on and I'm now convinced the problem is with WordPress or perhaps the editor I'm using in WordPress. I haven't seen this post yet, of course, because I'm drafting it in email, but the immediately preceding post about the Democrats and God was my case in point.

When I posted it, there was a one-sentence first paragraph that just cited the New York Times article. When the post appeared on my blog here, the blank line was gone, though there was a line break at the end of the short first paragraph. So I went into my WordPress Dashboard, edited the post and inserted a carriage return into the WYSIWYG editor. I updated the post and checked it. No change (yep, I refreshed the browser). I re-edited the post, this time using the editor's HTML view. I entered explicit paragraph tags for the second and third paragraphs, updated the post, viewed it in my browser. No change. I wondered if the problem was with the Safari WebKit rendering engine, so I looked at the post in Firefox. Same problem. 

I re-opened the post in HTML view in Safari and imagine my surprise when the two paragraph tag pairs I'd entered at the last step were gone! I replaced them, updated the post, and then re-opened the post for edit to be sure the tags were still there. They were.

Now, I'll allow for the possibility that some of this may be due to my upgrade to WordPress 3.0, but I'm skeptical since I was experiencing these issues long before the upgrade. I had begun using Dean's FCKEditor to replace WordPress' built-in editor but that plugin appears not to have been updated to work with the new WordPress.

All of this really serves to illustrate my long-stading reluctance to introduce seams into my workflow. Here, I'm passing an email to Posterous, which is updating my blog, so I have two seams (email-to-Posterous and Posterous-to-WordPress) to cross. Seams are just places for things to go wrong and get lost. I don't want to give up on Posterous, particularly if WordPress is the issue, but I cannot afford to make yet another blog switch; every time I do, I lose audience share.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

July 3, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Do Free Services Have an Obligation to Users? Should We Regulate Them?

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Many years ago, when the Internet was pretty new, my wife Carolyn
entrusted a couple hundred precious personal photographs to an online
sharing service whose name we can no longer remember. Unfortunately,
she, in her naivete, did not keep local copies of her photos. Mass
storage was relatively expensive and she felt like she had put her
photos into the hands of a professional service. What could go wrong?

At some point, she went to log in to show someone her photos and she
got a 404 error. The site was gone. Dead. No indication of what had
happened to it. No warning. Despite my considerable tech prowess and
good contacts, I was unable to identify any way to recover her
vanished photos. And since the service was free, it’s not clear they’d
have had any legal obligation to help anyway (though they clearly had
a moral obligation to do so). She has understandably never trusted
another free service. She isn’t even comfortable using Google Docs or
Google Calendar.

What do you suppose would happen today if, say, Twitter or FaceBook or
MySpace or LInkedIn suddenly announced the end of their free services.
If you want to keep your stuff, you have to pay up for a fee-based
membership. Even assuming they gave us a way to export our stuff so we
wouldn’t lose it, the hue and cry would be deafening.

Well, that’s essentially what Ning Networks just did. With a reported
2.3 million social networkers hosting their sites on Ning’s services,
the company has announced it is pulling the plug on free services –
except, apparently, those set up by teachers for their students’ use
– this summer. Everyone has to start paying a monthly fee that will
likely be a minimum of $35 or move their network to a different
service. As wired.com said, “Once again — see Tripod, Imeem, etc. —
users of a web service have had the rules switched on them once they
began relying on a service. That’s why it’s important to choose web
services that offer an easy way to grab your stuff and split — a
feature commonly known as ‘data portability.’” I agree but I think
Wired.com is letting folks off the hook too easily. Of what value to
anyone is the collection of their Facebook or Twitter posts absent the
network of people to whom it was addressed and with whom it was
shared? It’s not about data, it’s about relationships and investments
of time and psyche.

So Ning can’t figure out how to monetize free social networking — at
least at a high enough level to satisfy investors — and consumers end
up grabbing the short end of a messy stick. This is abysmal behavior
on Ning’s part. I don’t care if their rules allowed it and they
forewarned everyone. It’s a stinky way to do business and blackens the
eyes of all involved, including, unfortunately, one of the Net’s
really Good Guys, Marc Andreessen. The company says it is facing a $4
billion opportunity, which makes it even slimier to abandon their free
users, the ones who helped them debug, popularize and extend the
platform on which a few people will now become wealthy. If the
opportunity is that huge — and it might well be — why couldn’t the
company keep the free networks around and toss them a few grains of
rice now and then? Why was a total shut-down necessary? There’s really
only one answer: greed.

Maybe it’s time for the FCC and/or FTC and/or other agencies to look
at providing some form of cushion or insurance for free consumer
services so that the little guy doesn’t get stuck holding the smelly
bag of crap left behind by the greed mongers yet again.

In any case, this sucks.

(No, I don’t have an active Ning network. I did create one or two for
experimental purposes but they never blossomed because I wasn’t
impressed with the feature set available there compared to setting up
my own sites using WordPress and/or SocialSAM and/or NOLOH.)

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

May 4, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

CAPTCHA Alternatives Abound

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After my earlier post about an alternative approach to CAPTCH that I discovered today, I decided to spend a few minutes looking at what alternative approaches are being used and how accessible they are to programmers. I must say I was impressed by my findings, particularly since I focused this particular search only on WordPress plugins.

Why WordPress? Three reasons:

  1. I've been studying WordPress lately for some actual site work I'm doing for myself and two clients.
  2. WordPress has such a huge following that it borders on being a standard.
  3. It is pretty easy to find WordPress plugins without spending hours rummaging around the Web's attic.
I found that several different CAPTCHA approaches are available as easy-to-configure plugins for WordPress, including:

  • Saber which allows you to choose from among image, math or text tests, set the complexity of math challenges, email link confirmations before post, and a number of other altrnatives
  • NoSpamX uses an interesting idea of creating hidden form fields that a human wouldn't see and therefore wouldn't fill in but that a spambot would find and fill in because it blindly fills in all fields on a form.
  • WP Captcha-Free creates two hashes, one for login and one for comment post and compares them to detect the probability that a bot is at work.
  • WP-NOTCAPTCHA takes an interesting approach. It presents the user with three icons and instructs him or her to rotate them so they are properly oriented. I find this one particularly intriguing because not only would it seem, at least, to be all but unbreakable, but it is language-independent as well.
  • Mollom is like NoSpamX and WP Catcha-Free in that it is transparent to the user. It uses intelligent text analysis to filter out probable spam and then confronts suspected spambots with a dynamic CAPTCHA challenge so that only suspects get the experience.
I'm sure there are libraries in PHP and other popular programming and scripting languages to implement these same strategies but clearly the world of CAPTCHA is one with lots of attention focused on it.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

February 6, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Posterous Appears to be the Answer

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Well, it appears that Posterous is the solution to the problem of multi-network posting that I’ve been seeking. I’m posting this note via my gMail account and it promises to appear on  Facebook,  Twitter,  FriendFeed and my brand-new WordPress blog. Posting Nirvana!
I’ll want to experiment with things like embedding images and media in an email to see how it handles that more complex stuff, but for now it’s cool to have a single way to post to all of those services when I have something I’d like to say on all of them.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

August 1, 2009 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

My New Blog Look, Feel and Platform

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Welcome! You are looking at my brand-spanking-new release of the four-year-old OneMind blog. I hope you like the new look and feel.

A couple of weeks ago I decided that I wanted to switch my old blog, which was served on Drupal, to WordPress. There were a number of reasons for this. First, I’m finding more clients who are interested in having sites built in WordPress (and not just blogs either) and little or no demand for Drupal work. Second, I had to do an in-depth evaluation of WordPress for my biggest client and was blown away by how far the technology has come in the two years since I last visited it. Third, I really liked the way themes are designed and built in WordPress; I felt I could master them fairly easily and then be able to move on and create my own theme or take more control of the theme I chose. So far, that’s been the case.

There are so many available plug-ins for WP and they are in general so much easier to install, configure and use than those in Drupal (from which WP’s creators clearly learned) that I’m looking forward to a lot more enjoyable times experimenting with various features and enhancements.

Moving over from Drupal turned out to be fairly painless with some available tools and the help of my brother-in-law and sysadmin guru Jeff Soule.

So here we are. New digs. New navigation. Take a look around. Hope you like the place.

July 31, 2009 · Posted in General, Technology, Web technology  
　　　　

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