omgwtf!

i’m still seething.

this is a test post. i’m trying to figure some of this shit out by myself right now because that wordpress bullshit got me so unbelievably angry that i’m not fit for human company.

this is a new little thing i’m trying to include on the site but as you can see, it renders bizarrely. i’ll leave this post here in case someone from the site comes over here to take a look at what i’m talking about - i’m about to email them for some support.

hopefully they’ll be a lot nicer than the wordpress goons.

Edit: Saturday, 13 Jan 07

Well, I just heard back from Brad at indieKarma, and yeah, not only did he respond to me on a Saturday, which is very cool to begin with, but he was actually a very nice guy and explained what the problem probably was (snarky CSS), and asked for a week to try to sort it out on their side. He was totally casual penis. I approve highly, and because he was a nice guy I’m totally a fan of indieKarma. Plus they gave me a free dollar to start off with! Sweet!

It’s so much easier to be a decent human being than it is to be a raging, foaming cock, you know? And, I might add, better for business. Nobody in Bedford Falls liked Mr. Potter, but everyone just loved George Bailey.

Good luck, indieKarma guys! Let me know if I can help out somehow. And thank you for not being a dick to me, Brad. I’ve had a bad couple of days. Your being a decent guy, not treating me like an idiot, and giving me such a helpful reply to my support request really helped me feel a little bit better.

Comments(10)

AAAAAnnnd right in keeping with my firm belief that the WordPress “support” community is the worst fucking community on the Internets, my theory is proven soundly once again by its own members.

What’s funny is how I get called a troll and insulted for bitching about how fucking rude these assholes are, but if, for instance, you have a look at whoami’s past posts, you will see that he is pretty much regularly an asshole to other people all the fucking time. He’ll post in a thread just to do nothing more than insult you for not doing something the way he thinks it should be done. And then in his profile he describes himself thusly: “im not rude, im succinct. Dont want a straight answer, dont ask me. and while we are at, learn how to ask a question.”

lrn 2 rite nub. Jesus Christ.

He doesnt need to learn how to keep a civil fucking tongue in his head and shut his fucking mouth when he doesnt have an actual answer to a question, but you need to learn how to ask questions according to his specific guidelines nonetheless. Heh. He’s been on the site a while and he is absolutely typical of the type of “volunteer” that hangs out there to provide “support” to hapless users who go there honestly believing that theyll receive assistance.

Well, as I said in my posts there on that thread, I’m done with that fucking website and with that community. I’ll track down my answers amongst people who actually know enough of what theyre talking about to be able to give you some assistance if you have a question, instead of insulting you to make themselves feel better about being so ignorant and pathetic.

These guys are everything I despise about geeks wrapped up in a neat package. Arrogant, pretentious, condescending assholes who feel so lame and useless that all they can do is attack other people. I hate those fucking guys.

And for anyone who happens to be coming here from the link in that thread to either mock my website or myself, you are free to do so but remember two things:

- You dont mean fuck-all to me, because youre too stupid to live and I wouldnt piss on you if you were on fire, so your time would probably be better spent kicking puppies or whatever else it is that you get up to when youre not jerking off into a Dixie cup and drinking it because it’s the closest youll ever get to an actual blowjob; and

- Just because you volunteer your time does NOT GIVE YOU LICENSE TO BE A COCK. I know you think it does, but you’re fucking stupid, and you should save yourself all the effort of trying to think for yourself, ’cause you suck at it. Youre just wrong, and that’s all. Thinking youve got a right to treat other people like shit because you volunteer your time on the internet is like thinking you’ve got a right to stab someone because they took the seat you wanted on the bus. Do the human race a favour and kill yourself.

And whoami? Eat a bag of cocks, you rude, knuckle-dragging fuckwit. Calling you a Neanderthal would be an insult to Neanderthals.

I didnt get out of IT because of the users. I got out of IT because of the geeks.

I asked for a mod to contact me regarding all this bullshit but I dont expect them to. The only thing the WordPress “support” community is good for is taking potshots at other people from behind the safety shield of anonymity. When you actually stand up to them and demand responses and action, they fire insults at you from behind their barricades and then write you off as a troll. What makes me laugh is apparently they’ve got this new “Kvetch” system going in now. If these people actually cared at all about the users, they’d have responded to these complaints a long, long, long time ago now. This has been going on forever. Who the hell are they kidding? The people I feel most sorry for are the sorry bastards who are going to go there thinking that theyre actually going to get help.

MAN I’m SO PISSED right now!

Calendar links broken. « WordPress Support

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So! I knew it’d only take about a minute before I got tired of that orange thing this new theme had going. So I’ve made a few changes, primarily to the main page, to make it more palatable to the old peepers.

I’ve made it so that you no longer absolutely need to be registered and have a previously approved post to comment. Those measures were only in place because of the spam I’ve been getting hit with. However, since I’ve updated this theme and activated the Akismet plug-in, it’s caught almost 50 pieces of spam in just the past couple days and not one has gotten by. So I’m going to relax the restrictions for a while to see if anything gets through. Right now, the way I have it is that you need only supply a name and email addy to post; I’d like to keep it this way, and that’s what I’ll do provided Akismet keeps up the good work.

In the meantime, I kind of like the changes so far. If anyone notices anything heinously broken, drop me a line, would you? There’s still lots of stuff I want to do to this site, and since I have a new, working theme that doesnt have any insane code in it I’m able to make more changes and learn as I go along. I have pause here to say thanks and give a shout out to Kaushal Sheth, who is the guy who made the modified Fluidity 3C 1.0 theme that I used for this new layout. He took a lot of care to comment a bunch of stuff in the code and the CSS and that’s helped make it worlds easier to mess with this thing and learn as I go along. So that’s pretty awesome. Thanks, Kaushal!

Which reminds me - the calendar over to the left is broken in that it adds a trailing / to the end of the permalinks for each date. That breaks the link and sends you to a 403 page. I’ve made a post on the never-helpful WordPress forums regarding this, but of course I havent even received a reply, although this is a problem a lot of people have. As I’ve said before, I hate those motherfuckers over there. Theyre the rudest bastards on the Internet and they think their shit doesnt stink.

Anyway, it’s a matter of actually finding the bit of code in the php that runs the calendar that’s giving me the headache - once I can find out where it is, I can make it so that end / doesnt appear in there, and that will fix the whole situation. If you think you can help with that, I’d love to hear from you! Otherwise, you can use the calendar by just clicking any date you wish to peruse, then when you get to your inevitable 403 page, you just go up and manually delete that last / from the URI. Hit enter, and the page will load properly. I’ll get it fixed as soon as I can; trust me, it’s making me nuts and I am on a mission to find where it’s hidden!

Okay, I’m late for some incredibly boring work that’s due insanely early.

*sigh*!

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Okay, now I really do have to get to work. But I installed some widgets just now, for the first time - having an updated theme and all - and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with them! They seem like fun. I’m going to do some hunting around for more.

Also, I have to say that the documentation for WordPress seems to have gotten friendlier to use, with more information, as well. So maybe things this time around won’t be as infuriating trying to figure out. At any rate, I’m looking forward to it!

Huzzah!

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YAY!

I finally went ahead and backed up this whole blog (I’m usually much better at keeping backups; I’ve just been really extra-economy-sized blah blah lately about doing anything at all), database and all, finally upgrading WordPress (long overdue, but done at last), and finding and installing a new theme!

I’ve checked the couple of things that were egregiously broken, the most extreme of which was the total inability to actually see any of the posts anywhere except the main page - like when you click RSS feed links, for example, and come up with a blank entry (just the title and no post or anything). Just FYI, the same thing would happen when I’d be editing a post; the WP admin write window has at the bottom a WYSIWIG post preview that also returned a blank entry, just like what you would get when you click the RSS feed links. Apparently there was something in the previous theme I was using that was either missing or not coded correctly (maybe I screwed it up in my tinkering) that caused that to happen.

ANYway, this new theme appears to have remedied that unbelievably annoying bug and so all is well there, the posts can be seen on their own individual pages when you click ‘em, and my frazzled soul has been soothed - at least in that quarter.

Now that the thing is installed and appears to be working, I’m going to tart it up and mod it for my own tastes. I like the orange thing that the author has going here, but since it’s not one of my favourite colours, it’s going to get old pretty quickly. But that’s okay; I’ll have fun tweaking the thing to my preferences. I want to add some little widgets here that I’ve been looking into. I’ve found a whole SLEW of interesting little things that I want to shoehorn in here eventually.

Exciting!

Well, I’m off to do some scheming before work. If anyone notices anything broken or annoying (other than the content, in which case, piss off), please let me know!

YAY for new, unbroken themes!

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Some people like to bitch and moan that you have to register with this site in order to comment. Here’s a friendly little reminder of why that’s so, with some helpful advice:

Suck it up, dawg.

(wait, I can explain…)

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Edit #3: Well, I’ve been hard at it most of the day, and it’s now 4.30 and time to grab some vittles!

I managed to make a number of changes that I really wanted to make to the site; most importnat of which were the permalinks, the ability to excerpt and add a “more” link, and justifying the text alignment of the posts. A small but to me, important, detail.

I added some linkzorz and finally got my Weather Pixie on, as well as putting the Amber Alert back on the bottom of the page, and I sorted out my link categories and cleaned up some stuff in the appropriate documents that give WordPress the ability to do its thang.

I didnt lose my temper once the whole time.

WOOHOO!

Hello!

I’ll be working on the site today so if you notice freaky bits going on, things randomly breaking that were just working a second ago, or the sudden appearance and/or disappearance of stuff, now you know why.

Woohoo!

Time Edited to stick this up on top. Original time of post: 9.34 am, 2 July 2005

Edit #2: Holy crap…I did it! Not only did I make “pretty” permalinks but I actually figured out how to do excerpts with a “more” link under the post. They call them “teasers” in WordPress. No more 46 inch long posts!

YAY!

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Problems in the WordPress camp

This article said everything I feel about WordPress but have been too angry and frustrated to articulate without dissolving into a frenetic mess of profanity and aggravation.

I knew that the switch over to WordPress would be a challenging one; I have only the most rudimentary CSS knowledge and no PHP skills at all, though I was eager to learn. To my horror and irritation, it has been one catastrophe after another trying to get even the most simple things done. The unnecessary complexity of the software, combined with the utter lack of user friendly documentation even got my best friend and I into a vicious argument.

(wait, I can explain…)

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I’ve already managed to make a couple of groovy changes, and I sorted out a couple of things as far as where shit goes, as well. It’s all very exciting! I actually really like this theme. If I can manage to make the changes to it that I want, I’m not going to even bother making my own, because this base style is very similar to what I originally wanted. Tonight is the very first night that I’ve worked with WordPress and was both able to learn something, not lose my temper, and actually make changes I liked.

Sweet.

Edit: Okay so I’m screwing around with the Permalinks, and I broke some kind of thing I dont know what it is yet, but all the archives are now 404s. So I increased the posts on this front page to show all the entries and I found a page in the codex that has some information on how to troubleshoot things. However, I’m bleary eyed and I just realized it’s a quarter to three in the morning and I have 10 tapes to get done by 11:00 Monday morning, so I’m going to leave it broken and go to sleep. All the posts are viewable anyway. I’ll work on it some more when I get some time. Comments are broken, too, goddamn it. Fixing this is definitely a priority, even if I have to reinstall the theme to reset this crap.

Edit Edit: I fixed it! But now I dont have permalinks. So…imma leave it alone until I find out how to set permalinks up without breaking the entire archive and comment areas. Now I really am going to lie down for a while.

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Yeah, yeah. So I said that I would never use a theme for WordPress that someone else made. Fuck you.

Here’s the thing. I’m having a monumental battle with my rage. It’s really kind of stupid and I’m not only angry about the insane complexity of working with WordPress, but now I’m angry with myself for being so angry. There is no point to it. I’m not the only person complaining… and from what I’ve seen, the WordPress developers are aware of this malcontent, but dont seem to be doing much about it, although the development of the software continues apace. They are streamlining things in some areas, and of course this stuff takes time, but the documentation and how to information is sadly lacking. This is just the barest tip of the iceberg, but there is no reason to be so angry about it. I have three choices:

1. Shut the fuck up and dont use it.

2. Shut the fuck up and learn how to use it.

3. Shut the fuck up and wait until what you want them to provide is available and use something else in the meantime…or use someone else’s theme and adapt it to your own use over time. I might even learn something that way, frog forbid.

So, I’ve decided to mix and match a bit of numbers two and three: learn how to use it, wait for upgraded documentation and releases, and adapt someone else’s theme over time. But first I have to get over being so fucking angry about the whole thing, because now I just look at a tutorial and see red and then I can kiss any kind of motivation or concentration goodbye as a result. That’s really the worst bit. So as I sat here looking at the instructions on how to do something that should have been absurdly easy, and becoming more and more enraged so what I was trying to read might as well have been written in Swahili, I just said you know, fuck it. I’m going to go pick something that’s roughly close to the layout I want and then just tweak it. At least people will be able to read it and navigate through it, and I dont have to have a stroke in the meantime.

This layout is a little bit too accountantish for me to leave as is, but it’s a good framework for me to start playing with, and I like the colours. Once I get used to being able to post without thinking of how horrible the blog page is, I’ll be able to start messing around with it. Ubah.

In other news, my two older boyrats have vicious diarrhea.

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For days now, I’ve been writing stuff and not posting it because they turn into essays or articles and I dont like having all that stuff just out there on the front page, which is already hideous in its default skinosity. It doesnt need to be hideous and 3,600 miles long as well.

Edit:

Yeah, well, I just clipped a bunch of rant here that was really kind of vitriolic and pointless and didnt make much sense. It was badly written and full of stupidness.

I am not by nature a retiring or shy person. There are situations in which I am shy, by they are not many in number. I don’t really like people very much, so I do avoid large groups of them. One on one, people tend to be much more palatable.

However, the primary reason that I put this blog up is because I missed a place to write. However…whatever…the reason might be, I like it when people read my stuff, and I want people to read my stuff. The problem is that nobody really will because I am so angry about everything, and not in an amusing way. Rather, I’m just angry in a stupid, sort of hopeless, obscenity-laden, pointless bog of a way that is nothing more than unappealing and even kind of embarassing at some level. Maybe even pathetic. At least, that’s how it feels to me. I want to write. I want to do it well.

So I snipped out the garbage that I posted below that first paragraph up there at the top and have rewritten it. It may still be bad but it won’t be pathetic, and that’s the important thing here. I will be controlling it, and not the other way around. Things have to change around here. Stuff is coming apart at the seams. I need to get a fucking grip.

Right. WordPress.

It has gotten to the point now where I simply have been so inconvenienced by the utter complexity…and worse, the almost total lack of comprehensible documentation…of this software that I have lost all interest in learning what I need to learn in order to make the site into what I want it to be. I have a number of tutorials and several other sources at my disposal to try to get a handle on what’s going on here, but each infinetesimal morsel of information is gleaned at a cost of several hours of frustrated…and largely fruitless…surfing, as well as some highly technical reading.

A few of the tutorials I have are geared ostensibly toward the beginner, including a walkthrough that Mu took the time and effort to write. Unfortunately, I have yet to find any tutorial out there which meets three all-important goals for any really good newbie tutorial:

1. Plain English text that lays out the information to people who have no experience whatsoever with the software or the languages required to work with it. Assume no previous knowledge, and provide either links or charts that supply the necessary information. And please, for the love of Pete, don’t just give me the instructions to create a site of your own design. While I truly appreciate the effort you put into making this tutorial for us clueless noobs out here, please understand that I dont want to make your site. I want to know how to make one of my own.

2. An index that clearly explains all features, their functions, different common layout templates, and how to achieve these customizations so as to get them to work correctly with WordPress. Also, a clearly delineated list of elements that must be included on every blog would be very nice. Explain what things are, where they have to go, what they do, where and why they should be included, and how to modify them properly. Don’t just tell me “put this here and dont worry about it.” That’s not only inadequate, it’s insulting. Educate me.

3. Screenshots.

This has become such an issue now that the absurdity of it all offends me on some unstable, geeky level. How could documentation not have been written at the same time as the software was being compiled?

Even though the software is extremely complicated to use for a beginner, and even folks who aren’t such beginners, it’s not the complexity of it that annoys me so greatly. It’s the lack of software documentation.

I really do appreciate that some terribly clever folks took a lot of time out of their lives to not only create WordPress, but to distribute it to the ungrateful masses (such as myself) free of charge. I am not ungrateful for such generosity. But try as I might to quell the irritation, I have now gotten so fed up with dealing with the monstrously brutal, unnecessary learning curve that I have lost almost all interest in actually learning to work with it. I sit and start to read through the codex or try to decode a tutorial, and within 30 minutes my rage is finely honed. Ten minutes after that, my mind is elsewhere and I begin to fall asleep.

I dont want to use someone else’s skin. I dont want someone else to design a skin for me, even if it’s to my exact specifications. I want to know how to do it myself. The creators and supporting team behind WordPress have unfortunately made this so difficult that at this time I have to say that I wouldn’t recommend this software to anyone I know who didnt already have the necessary skills to work with it without developing an ulcer. It’s just not a good bet for probably 90+% of the potential users.

I dont want it dumbed down so idiots can use it. I want to be smartened up so I can use it. Documentation is the cure for all these ills. Write the tutorials, make the codex actually useful, and WordPress will be totally awesome.

As it stands now, I’ll try to figure out how to change the font so that it’s not so disgusting. And then we’ll see what happens after that.

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