But what good is it if nothing works together? Case in point. The program we use for this website is called WordPress. It is a nifty little program that is highly configurable and customizable. People have come up with a number of different themes (the way it looks) and plugins (the stuff it does) for you to choose from. I also use this program on my wife’s blog. Well, the plugin that we use to make it so that you can play the podcast on the site has an update. On my wife’s blog, we have the updated version (version 7.9). Here we are using 7.7. So I decide I’ll go ahead and update this one since the new version is a bit easier to use from the back end. Well, an hour later I finally un-install the damn thing and reinstall the 7.7 version. It seems like this theme just doesn’t play nice with a lot of plugins. Once I upgraded, all the podcasts disappeared from the site. Not cool. At first I thought I had to repost them or move them or that I had upgraded wrong so I fiddled with it for about an hour before I decided to just reinstall the older version.

This is wikipedia all over again. Sure, we can modify it as much as we want but that doesn’t necessarily mean its better (sure, it’s better than Windows Millennium Edition (it made #4 on the list) but so is the telegraph). What it means is that if you are a programmer (none of us around here are) you can tweak it to your heart’s content. But if you aren’t, you’re at the mercy of “designers” that are under no obligation to make sure things work together, work at all, and have no stake in supporting their “products”. OK, these plugins are free (they ask for a donation most of the time) so perhaps I shouldn’t be complaining but I am. The worst part of it is that these people don’t even speak English! They speak some forum of pig-HTML that only other programmers understand. You read the instructions on some of these plugins and you start to think to yourself, “You know, what these people need is for Denon to start writing their manuals for them.” Talk about obtuse. Here’s an example from the FeedBurner instructions:

NOTE: If you currently use the old, 2005-vintage version of the Ordered List FeedBurner plugin that generates a FeedBurner-specific URL (an example: www.yoursite.com/feedburner_838196/), that URL is no longer available or necessary. You will have to reset your FeedBurner feed’s Original Feed address to now use your standard blog feed address. Additionally, you should examine any .htaccess files that control access to your WordPress installation’s content and remove any existing references that forward or redirect your feeds, as these references will no longer be necessary.

Um… what?! I have a better idea, how ’bout you rephrase that in some human language so I can at least put it into Babelfish and get a bad translation. I don’t even know what a .htaccess file is! So, for now until someone around here figures out how to speak programmer, the site is done. DON’T TOUCH IT!!! I have spoken. My will be done.

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