Turnaround in the forum

The continued very public, and very embarrassing disintegration of mad mike is continuing. It does not look like any one can do much to help. His paranoia, hits new highs daily. Still now the WP com forum is cleared of the dead wood there is some very good support going on. Timethief has rushed into the breach and is doing a fine job. I really do hope that a more inclusive approach is going to be adopted by all contributors. A kinder , gentler forum if you like. Everybody knows the posters are clueless. We know better than most. We have been there. But the task is to assist. Not to belittle. We will see how it goes.

Update: Sadly his not quite an ex mod act of hanging round the forums dissing everybody including the only mod still trying to keep the thing together has now led to him being banned from the WordPress forums completely. A sorry sight.

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.

My father just died

My father just died. He was a fucking miserable cock sucking son of a bitch and if I had my way he would have dragged his sorry stroke induced decrepit mess for another twenty years. He invented mental cruelty. He masterminded parental neglect. He specialised in psycholgical torture. No blow was too low for him. No tactic too base. No insult was unworthy enough to fall from his cruel lips. His eyes were like a dead shark. His skin was florrid. His eyelids heavy. His rotund corpulence coughed and expostulated through life. While I grew up in poverty he smoked 40 fags a day and drank half a bottle of whisky every night. Let this be his epitaph. STANLEY EDGAR WALLIS – hated by everyone who knew him. People think I am wierd? They are probably right.

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.