Now this really sucks

Among the brouhaha about forum mod the PTB at WP com have slipped in another horror this week. I give you recent comments avatars. How cool are they? Or they would be. If that idiot Matt Mullenweg and his gang had not marked them up in tables of all things. Furthermore not only is the mark up an abomination to any web standards developer but the widgets both at Org and Com now seem to generate their own CSS which turns up in the head of the document a la Kubrick. Furthermore and slightly OT in the fiasco of org upgrading to eliminate the increasingly common security flaws, they keep changing the widget markup therein. And even when they gravitate to a new schemata it is incomplete and inconsistent. Our old friend li h2 appears fleetingly. Then its ul li But at Org in some themes they seem to have ditched the nested lists from hell completely and gone for h2, and a with no list at all. as I started doing 2 years ago. . But of course its not used at Org. Yet. This is causing havoc in the theming community. They really do need to get someone, heck anyone in, who knows what they are doing in this regard. As I understand it poor Mark seems – at least from his forum comments – to have been roped in. He would the first to say that CSS is not his strongest suit. Bryan Veloso of course was fired after five minutes. I can feel a Nuclear Moose coming on.

A ding dong in the forum.

There has been much wailing and nashing of teeth in the Com forum apropos the sudden *firing* of WP volunteer moderator drmike. It was inevitable. It is OK for an old misanthrope like me to complain, but a moderators responsibilities are different. drmike has repeated used his position as a platform to take endless sideswipes at *staff*. That was clearly unsustainable. There are private channels. He could have resigned. But no. He stayed and did his best to embarrass Automattic at every opportunity. Mark is right. He needs a rest.

drmike also engaged in some very confrontational guerilla tactics with some very experienced WP users. Words like *spammer* should not be used lightly or inappropriately. He can’t complain if some people fight fire with fire.

I have posted in the WP forums for a long time. Sometimes to good effect. Sometimes controversially. But I have until now never butted heads with a mod because it is a no win situation. They have a thankless unpaid task. They are inevitably not perfect. So why diss them? drmike though falls into a different category. I wish him well but I think he needed time to regain his perspective. WordPress dot com gave him that.

Habari themes – Galileo launched

In what is my first release of a template for nearly eighteen months I am supporting the Habari Project – with a new template called Galileo. This one is Galileo II for two columns.

Habari Rant

I am in a funny position with Habari. On just about the very day I decided to re-enter the blogoshere Habari was announced. It was up and apparently running on a couple of sites. I can’t bring myself to use WP org. I did nt want to go to TXP (been there done that got the tee). So what? I thought without a Habari install with some type of functionality I would have no motivation to stay involved. Has
it worked? No way. This goes beyond teething problems. There is something radically wrong with the whole development process. Today I rolled forward to r.493. Doing an install and merging my existing theme which was under construction took five hours. Undocumented changes in posts / comments.
The reward. Zilch. No comments. Broken posts. No uri in posts. No images in posts. I can feel a Nuclear Moose coming on. But oh. Whats this? More bloated graphics software is now available from Inkblot dot com apparently. Oh deep joy. A set of web useable graphics for the Habari Project would be more use.

Titanium Sinn 103

For folk following the emerging watches for grown ups series here is the absolutely magnificent Sinn 103. You could upgrade to the UTC of course but to mind that spoils the simplicity and elegance of the 103.

Gorgeous.