ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Sorry, Fired. —

There was a new version of this weblog. It is gone now. I am back at my old one.

I tried to upgrade. It was painful, obtuse, silly, required me to spend 3 hours writing rewrite rules, and then presented me with dogshit. I have lost a day of productivity, and I am seething at this.

Weblogs are simple things. Please don’t tell me they aren’t. Applications, engorged with obtuse feature sets for irrelevant standards conjured by latte-jittered man-children are not weblogs. Applications get to be complicated and huge and silly, and when composed of terrifying blobs of PHP and Perl and Rails and whatever other common nouns/abbrevations are, they can be as silly as they want. But I don’t want them.

I want what I download and install to look like my weblog currently looks. I take advantage of a tiny, tiny set of features and I am a happy person. I concentrate, after all, on getting projects done and doing my writing. I’m still spry enough to compose the odd script or two to do something repetitive, like a gallery of images or some other nib-nab. I don’t need to be wrapped in an entirely new made-up markup language to get my job done.

Sorry, I shouldn’t have to negotiate stacks of embedded templates in form after form, rooting around as if some sort of rodent, with the hoping and faith-based leaps of wishing that, at the end, I’d end up with an actual black page with green text on it. That’s insane. I deny it and reject it.

No, I do not want “assistance” and “help”, pulling in favors for the ultimate goal of making software that obviously does not do what I want it to do, do what I want it to do. That just leads to the inevitable conclusion by others that I was somehow able to do it on my own. And it would be so not true.

Anil, you’re a great guy. Your product blows. Keep smiling.


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2 Comments

  1. Flack says:

    Back before I knew what a “blog” really was, I wrote my own in ASP. The script allowed me to update my home page from a browser; that, in and of itself, was huge. New entries were added to the top of the file. (Technically, the new entry was saved and the old entries were appended to the end of it, but whatever.) The script was somewhere around 5k, and it worked great. In comparison, the new version of WordPress is 1.2 meg (zipped). It uses a database backend and has all sorts of bells, whistles, sorting tools and pretty editing features. In the end, all I want to do is write, and update, easily. If a product does more than that, it’s getting in the way. Sorry to hear about your experience, but glad to see you’re back on your feet.

  2. Patrick says:

    Sad…
    A sure thing is that you’re not the only one. I have a few friends who, although being tech people, lost patience when upgrading MT. Some even left it forever. Something is wrong.