{"id":1378,"date":"2006-04-14T18:07:55","date_gmt":"2006-04-14T17:07:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/04\/14\/better-leave-at-the-top-of-your-game\/"},"modified":"2006-04-17T00:31:46","modified_gmt":"2006-04-16T23:31:46","slug":"better-leave-at-the-top-of-your-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/04\/14\/better-leave-at-the-top-of-your-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Better leave at the top of your game&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Wherein the author enumerates much meaningless data and uses them as springboard for some slightly more topical meandering&#8230;<\/i><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>1,059<\/strong> WordPress plugins currently sit on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wp-plugins.net\/\">wp-plugins.net<\/a>. Not bad for a project that was half-shunned by the official WP pubah(s) from the very beginning. Kinda getting worried by the amount of bandwidth this is eating off my quota right now (read: somewhere in the 200% vicinity). But we&#8217;ll cross that bridge when it starts falling.<\/li>\n<li><strong>11,232<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wordpress\/spam-karma\/\">SK2<\/a> downloads for the year 2006 so far. There again, not bad for a plugin that doesn&#8217;t happen to be <a href=\"http:\/\/akismet.com\/\">the one packaged by default in WordPress 2.0<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>968<\/strong> comments (mostly Trackbacks and Pingbacks, as I closed comments on this page a while back) on <a href=\"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wordpress\/spam-karma\/\">SK2&#8217;s homepage<\/a>. Can&#8217;t help but notice an uncannily high percentage of posts from Germany. Is SK2 like, the David Hasselhoff of anti-spam plugins?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As you can tell, despite being on cruise-control mode, the Deliverables Department of UnknownGenius Corp. is doing nicely. As for where it&#8217;s heading, I suppose I may use the occasion to offer a quick update:<\/p>\n<p>The short answer is that it is going nowhere.<\/p>\n<p>The longer answer is that, ultimately, I will be phasing out <em>all<\/em> WordPress development (and most web coding, actually) from my activities.<\/p>\n<p>For those who care about the <i>Why<\/i>, I will try to provide some elements without delving too deep into the multiple layers of frustration and unrelated motives for my general disinterest toward WordPress at the moment:<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Recently, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skippy.net\/blog\/2006\/03\/23\/wordpress-less\/\">Skippy<\/a> summed-up quite nicely the building frustration in the WP community. Mine has been growing along a similar path and, after voicing my concerns a few times last year, I eventually decided to save me the time and energy and silently started shifting out most of my WP-related activities. Like Skippy, I take issues with the way WP development is &#8220;managed&#8221;, I also have serious concerns about the increased melting of public open-source code with semi-private interests, as reflected by the blatantly commercial marketing strategies of recent releases. Don&#8217;t get me wrong: I am not one of those open-source zealots who considers it a crime for software authors to make a dime off their work, I just do not like the way it&#8217;s done here.<\/p>\n<p>On a wider scale, I guess I am getting tired of the whole &#8220;Web 2.0&#8221; micro-bubble, the underwhelmingly banal concepts it rests on and the mix of greed and naive enthusiasm that propels it. I was there the first time around, and believe me: little else of durable value was invented during that era beside the Skyy &#038; Red Bull cocktail. Oh, I&#8217;m sure a few people will manage to make some cash this time too, and I certainly wish them all the success they deserve. But I see little reason contributing my time graciously to help selling <a href=\"http:\/\/automattic.com\/\">Automattic<\/a> to Yahoo or some other acquisition-hungry greying Bay Area corporation, which is what developing for WordPress increasingly felt like, as of late.<\/p>\n<p>Please do not panic (and do not listen to the well-meaning people that might be inclined to tell you otherwise): I am <em>not<\/em> dropping <a href=\"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wordpress\/spam-karma\/\">Spam Karma<\/a> nor <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wp-plugins.net\">wp-plugins.net<\/a> any time soon. I will keep doing as I have over the past few months: maintain and improve as mandatory, without any sort of long term planning (in the positive or the negative) as long as things remain stable. If push comes to shove and I <em>really<\/em> have to make a decision, I will at the very least ensure that the legacy of these projects is maintained, and you will long be blogging on neuro-quantic interfaces before you have to worry about alternative ways to ward comment spam off your blog. If anything, I have no intention to stop my blogging, and WP remains, at the moment, the best option for my needs, so you can find reassurance in my own necessities.<\/p>\n<p>As for other tentative projects of the past (<a href=\"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wppm\/\">WPPM<\/a>, minor WP plugins etc.), I am saddened to say that the chances of resuscitation are inching closer to zero with each passing day. I have toyed with miscellaneous new ideas (including starting the new blogging platform of my dreams from scratch), but decided that, in the end, this wasn&#8217;t the direction I wanted to take with my time. Sure, I have to refrain an impulse to start coding, each time I pass the now-defunct <i>one-click install<\/i> FAQ, but really, it&#8217;s all for the best. Of course, if some generous benefactor shows up with $3,000 in cash and asks to see the most kick-ass WPPM 2 s\/he&#8217;s ever seen, I won&#8217;t be difficult to convince (I&#8217;m a fairly venal ilk of genius these days), barring that unlikely event, we shall say new coding adventures will be kept for brighter days and a very distant hypothetical future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wherein the author enumerates much meaningless data and uses them as springboard for some slightly more topical meandering&#8230; 1,059 WordPress plugins currently sit on wp-plugins.net. Not bad for a project that was half-shunned by the official WP pubah(s) from the very beginning. Kinda getting worried by the amount of bandwidth this is eating off my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[36,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code","category-wordpress-tweaking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}