Test post for commenting
29 Aug 2004What’s going on?…
I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
I’ve had a cold for the last few days, which is impeding life and normal activity in general. A group of people from church were having a “cook-off” over two weeks, with the girls cooking for the guys last Friday, and the guys doing the same the following week… Hehe, someone will have to fill me in as to what standard of cooking is expected of us next week (assuming I don’t die/stop breathing/something between now and then)!
Marcello informs me that he was really impressed with the amount of effort they put in, which can only leave me a bit worried. :P We’ll come up with something killer… there’s still a whole five days between now and next Friday!
I’m missing church this evening, too, which is never great… less so seeing it’s Al Radloff’s third last week at ESM, before heading North-ish to the Gold Coast. I’m told that this place is even further North than Tori’s house, but this rumour remains unconfirmed. ;)
Wow. That’s… possibly the first time I’ve seen it do that! I went to open a file, wp-comments-reply.php, and it just froze. Kill process, rinse, repeat. Crashes again. Re-open, open another file. No problems. Open wp-comments-reply.php.
Crashes, again.
Doh! At least the file I was actually trying to edit opened okay… you can now post ordered and un-ordered lists in comments if you feel so inclined :P … I know I sometimes do!
Later…
I just re-read the title of this post and burst out laughing. Just for the record, Quanta is an editing application, and not an Australian airline.
After briefly flirting with Daring Fireball’s Markdown, I have since abandoned the tool for several reasons. Firstly, I’m convined that (this version of) WordPress’ implementation of it sucks… simply because code that works perfectly well on the Dingus page fails in a most spectacular fashion when applied locally.
Yeah. So that was sufficiently disappointing. I’m inclined to blame WordPress over the utility itself, because according to the WordPress Plugins page, it was written in Perl, translated to PHP, and then again modified for inclusion in WordPress. It’s just like programming Chinese Whispers, really.
What’s more, is it added a large-ish time to my page generation, which just won’t do, considering the fact that I’m trying to prove a point over here!
Then, of course, there is the complication of trying to learn a new markup (or down) language, and making sure this doesn’t interfere with my use of real HTML. I believe the documentation when it says that it won’t, but the fact that WordPress’ implementation of it seems to be so broken causes the rising of eyebrows.
It looks relatively fixable with little amounts of effort, but (yes, there always is one, isn’t there?) I’d imagine that this would either have been resolved or abandoned for the 1.3 build of WordPress (still in development and testing) — I’m running 1.2 this part of the world.
Yeah. The style you’d see if you were reading this on Saturday, August 28, 2004, would be Silver Is The New Black, as featured on Alex King’s WordPress CSS Style Competition website. Unfortunately, part of its appeal can be attributed to its use of proprietry Mozilla CSS hooks, which just sucks.
Not because they’re not nice: they are. But the whole lack of standards compliance (coming from the platform everyone seems to be proclaiming as the uber-standards testing platform) is really irritating, regardless as to how well the Mozilla engine might handle established standards. If, in five years time, those “proprietry” hooks become used for something else, then we have five-year-old content which is screwed over. Admittedly, -moz-radius isn’t something which seems very likely to be applied elsewhere, but the principle remains.
So yeah… It’s nice and all, but I’m hacking it back to standards compliance, before making it look DIFFERENT from the original style. To be fair, this style is really only an intermediate step, until I can bang together something which I’m happy with. And even then, I’ll probably only be happy with it for a few weeks or months, but hey ;)
On another note, the page generation time on this magnificent piece of software really isn’t that bad. I haven’t had an opportunity to test it on a remote server yet, but I’d say it is DEFINITELY faster than my own blog script even with the calendar enabled.
This is being written with WordPress running on my own server, and generation times with the Calendar are averaging 0.037s. With Calendar disabled, this drops to a smooth 0.029s generation average. At any rate, even if I were being pounded with a few thousand hits per second (which, in case you hadn’t already realised, I’m not!), the generation times wouldn’t be substantial compared to the saturation of bandwidth!
I don’t really think that is a valid argument against WordPress, sorry. Anyhoo… I’m off to hack at styles and things!