It’s been a while since I had an out-and-out rant in a blog post, but this has been brewing in the darker corners of my mind for months, if not years.
I have been writing online in one form or another since before the internet (in the shape of the world wide web - which is NOT “the internet”) started. During that time I have used all manner of interfaces, systems and platforms, and taken part in more communities than I might shake a many pronged stick at.
They all sucked in one way or another.
Today’s rant will mostly concern the web content management platforms du jour; the latest and greatest. I’m going to dump on them all for one reason or another.
WordPress
Oh mighty WordPress, how dare I criticise you, atop your might self-built Olympus. Answer me these few questions though;
Where the hell are the content types that were promised in version 3 ?
Why on earth do you charge to modify CSS at wordpress.com ?
Why do you charge to attach domain names, when none of your competitors do ?
Why, after all these years, do you still run NL2BR on all plain text posts? Sometimes we want to write our own damn paragraph tags.
Drupal
I want to like you, really I do, but there are several things that bug the hell out of me…
I can put up with you being a more developer oriented system, but that’s only really any good if your documentation is any bloody good at all. Yes, I know the community is supposed to write the documentation, but really - the existing stuff is shockingly bad.
Why does the core system not have the ten or so “essential” modules pre-installed?
Why on earth is RSS so badly implemented in the core installation?
Why do we have to install CCK, Views, and Panels to truly turn you into a Content Management System ? (kind of like installing MacOS in a VM to turn Windows into a nice operating system). Just because we can is not necessarily something to be proud of.
Posterous
Posterous could easily become the best blog platform out there, if only for a few “issues”;
Given your public pride about publishing blogs by email, why do you not clean the HTML of common email providers before publishing? A glimpse at the raw HTML you publish highlights why search engines are never going to like your content.
Given the need to author complex posts by hand in HTML, why do you insist on completely trashing the hand entered HTML even after you have given the user the choice to enter it by hand ?
Given your public grand-standing about importing from so many other platforms, why is your WordPress import so shockingly bad? I mean really, really bad… mangled HTML, loss of virtually all paragraphs, and many more idiotic transgressions.
If we’re going to be forced to write posts by hand to ensure correct formatting, please give the raw HTML mode a feature or two, instead of… well - there are no features, are there.
Tumblr
Land of the young (and pretty), and also land of the creative (and pretty). Ruled bynarcissism, but ultimately entertaining, Tumblr would be lovely if only the following were not true;
Please allow public comments. Immediately.
Please stop trying to be a walled garden - it’s not a good idea, and is preventing many lifestreamers from touching you with a long stick.
What the hell is the author of your admin interface on ? Why do so many of the features of a blog have to be hidden in strange places? Sometimes it feels like I’m trying to find my house number screwed behind the washing machine.
Your reliability of late is rivalling Twitter at the bottom of it’s bell curve. Do something about that too.