Rants

There are a few shows I watch on TBS. I missed an episode of one of them. Luckily, at TBS.com you can watch episodes for free. Or not. I go there to catch up on a missed episode and guess what. We’re sorry, you must have Microsoft Windows to watch this video. Wtf? Seriously. Aren’t we at a point where specific operating systems shouldn’t be a requirement to watch a video on the internet? It’s not like my MacBook is a new invention and Macs haven’t been around for a while. They have. And their market share is growing. Rapidly. Support other operating systems so you don’t alienate users. I know I’ll never be going back to their website again. That’s a shame, because I could have generated them revenue by visiting to watch videos. Now if I miss episodes, I’ll have to find some other way to watch them.

Now if I could just get Adobe to allow for the most recent flash to be on the Wii so I can watch Hulu, I’d be happy. Not the Wii’s fault. Not Hulu’s fault. It’s all on Adobe.

I really don’t understand how the American public is letting Fox news get away with their smearing of Obama.  People on the channel have called him Osama, equated his fist-touch with his wife as a terrorist gesture, said he’s Muslim, and are now being completely racist by calling his wife, yes, wife his baby mama.  This is not only disrespecting her, but also their two children.

 The slang term baby mama refers to a woman who is the mother of a child by a man who is not married to her and has no intentions of marriage.  That is not the Obama family in the least.  Don Imus didn’t get away with calling basketball players “nappy-headed hoes,” and rightfully so, so why should Fox News (and I use the term news lightly) get away with things like this?  You know that if someone on the left said something about Bush or McCain there would be a demand for an apology and that person would be fired or would resign.  What if the left started putting up images questioning McCain’s mental health (the very thing that Bush did in the 2000 primaries to defeat McCain)?

The American public needs to finally speak out against Fox and their propaganda machine.  If they keep going unchecked they will keep making up lie after lie.

I would like to state that who ever designed the widget interface in WordPress 2.5 is a complete moron. A retarded monkey could have done better. Gone are the days where you just drag and drop widgets. Have more than one sidebar or widgetized area? No problem, just drag the widgets to the corresponding widgetized area. No, in 2.5, you have to select which sidebar you want to edit from a dropdown, then add the widgets to that sidebar. Then you have to click save and choose the next sidebar from the dropdown. Oh wait, you want to move something from sidebar 2 to sidebar 1? Ok, instead of dragging and dropping like you did before you have to go to sidebar 2, remove it, save, go to sidebar one, add it, save. What a pain in the ass. EDIT: Also, if you go to a theme that has less sidebars than your previous, the widgets mess up. It’ll display whatever widgets you have in sidebar 1 from the previous theme, but when you change it and hit save, it removes them all and puts widgets from sidebar 2, making you do the whole process over again.

One of the things that has bugged me over the past year or so with WordPress is that the community seems to be disappearing. Some of the developers have left to create other software and some have just left. It seems the passionate group of volunteers that helped support WordPress have moved on as well. The WordPress IRC channel was once a place I enjoyed hanging out in and helping whenever I could. Now, I never speak in there. I hardly look at what’s being said in there at all. Some of the volunteers that helped out in the forums have even been asked to leave by Matt and company. Matt seems to be doing a great job at driving a wedge in the community. His way, or leave. Or as he once put it, you don’t like it, fork it.

Themes.wordpress.net is pretty much a graveyard. I used to go there several times a week to check out all the nice new designs that people were making. Even if I wasn’t ever going to download the themes it was nice to see what was being produced. Now the only place that publishes new WordPress themes on a regular basis seems Weblogtoolscollection.com, and that has even seemed to slow down a bit. I don’t know if that’s because passionate theme developers aren’t producing themes anymore or what. Now your choice is to use Google and hope you don’t find a site that puts malicious links and/or code into the theme you download.

The latest thing that Wank pointed out is that the Plugins page on the Codex no longer exists. It was a fairly complete list of plugins for WordPress. It’s no longer there. So if Matt chooses to tell you your plugin isn’t good enough for the official repository, there’s no place to notify users that your plugin exists. That page on the Codex was a great page. Also absent from Extend is the link for themes. It was there before 2.5 came out. So, Matt takes away the theme repository, has the plugins page deleted, drives away developers and volunteers and this is supposed to be a community? Yeah, right.