28 Aug 2004
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.
28 Aug 2004
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!
28 Aug 2004
I just cracked 6000 spam messages. I can’t wait until I start running my own mail server locally; I really really really want to see how much using all that sample material will stop dead!
Perhaps when iiNet bring their iiSLAM’s to Kensington, NSW… and if they keep the “testing” unlocked backchannel enabled! Haha, symmetric “A”DSL – Got to love it.
In other news, I’ve decided that I probably won’t be bothering with mod_rewrite on this iteration of the website, because I think it’s going to get dumped sometime in the near future anyway… that said, Google actually seems to be indexing down to my permalinks without any difficulties anyway!
I’m currently failing to see the benefit of using my own news/blog script over something more advanced, and would prefer to invest time in other projects (specifically, to enhance and extend the content management system to better support CSS, XHTML, semantics and improve authentication and user management, amongst many other things) rather than re-doing what’s been done before, and better, without seeing any real tangible benefit for it. And yes, I do know there are better, more advanced, more usable (open-source) CMS offerings out there. Integration of features offered by those products is something that is being explored, but until that is feasible, development of this one will continue…
Despite whatever nasty things people might have to say about WordPress, the more I see, the more I like, so nyah.
At the minute, design and standards are something I’m far more passionate about, anyway.
28 Aug 2004
Addiction is…
…finding comments like /* drunk, fix later */ and /* too high to make this work */