Not Really Worth Your Time

[#nevermind]

Two and a half not-quite random notes on blogging:

(1) While This Is has seen, in recent months, an apparent increase in readership, it is, as near as anyone can tell, all bots and spiders and whatever else. The pattern is clear, though: When posting daily, it is true the blog sees greater readership than, say, this time last year. Longer periods between posts can trigger a swell in readership; it really does appear some manner of Scooby-Snack behavioral econ, trying to get attention so someone will be encouraged to use the product more.

(2) While this would seem to point back to WordPress and Automattic, neither can I explain the weird phenomenon about “Top Searches”. Then again, this has been going on longer than the increased reader statistics that never really do add up. Still, the constant inquiries about journalists are ridiculous.  

Full Color Stupid

Write this up as user error.

No, seriously. We’re talking about the software industry, which never makes any mistakes anywhere, ever. It’s always user error.

Yes, we’re confident about that assertion, or, at least, the fact that it exists. Living in Microsoft country, we have enough friends who work in the software industry to start dropping friends when this issue comes up.

To wit, the image below is a composite of the daily stats report for This Is. In truth, we’re happy to break fifty hits a day, so thank you all for stopping by.

But do you notice the problem?

No, really. Just … look. The only reason you might need to look carefully is that what is missing is much larger than the mistake it might compel you to make.

That is to say, if you’re wondering why WordPress has the United Kingdom so far to the east, it’s because that isn’t the U.K. It is Kaliningrad, Russian Federation.

See? User error.

That WordPress apparently thinks the U.K. doesn’t exist on this planet is immaterial, or else it’s another user error. Because, you know, Automattic is a software company, and software companies never make mistakes.

It’s always user error.

A Note to WordPress

To: WordPress

re: Double-encoding

Stop double-encoding … now … please.

† † †

What It Looks Like When WordPress Kills the Joke and Sucks All the Humor Out of the Moment Because They’re a Bunch of Morons Who Want to Pitch Their Product to Writers by Showing How Nice It Is for Administrators Who Want to Data-Mine Readers for Demographics

You know, I forget what the damn joke was to go with this one. I’ve had to try to repost this so many damn times because suddenly WordPress doesn’t like to put pictures in posts, or something, or maybe it’s just my goddamn browser, which has been freaking out about Flash of late to the point that Unicode can make it collapse if it’s open to a page with that ridiculous excuse for software that reminds us why the French used to have a justice system to send people to prison for cooking food badly. At any rate, here’s a fuckin’ picture of a sad robot. Whatever. It’s Matt Tarpley’s, of course.

But, you know, it’s like having to do a scene five times not because you’re botching the line, but the first time the lighting is wrong, the second time the sound is wrong, the third time you realize they never took the lens cover off, the fourth time it becomes apparent the microphones aren’t plugged in, the fifth time the CCD is busted … yeah, baby, yeah, keep that mood goin’!

And what is probably most disturbing about it all is that all this could be avoided if websites like WordPress stopped bloating their software with that fucking disease called Flash.

No, seriously, when did the business model become, “Let’s screw our product into the ground and see how long people keep trying”?

Hint: They’ll put up with it as long as it’s free. But when it comes time to actually go out and spend money building an enterprise, the smart money will be spent on something a little less glamorous, but that actually works.

____________________

Tarpley, Matt. Mary Death. 3 February 2015.

A Self-Gratifying Note About Nothing of Any Importance

It is true that these are fantastic statistics for This Is; after all, we’re a free blog with volunteer staff who get around to posting something when we have time. Or are irritated, frustrated, outraged, awestruck, or otherwise emotionally moved, such as when the struggle is to stop laughing long enough to properly address a keyboard.

The caveat, of course, is that statistics are only worth what they actually tell us:

If you tag your posts effectively, this panel will show you which topics get the most traffic. Snapshot generated from your top posts over the past week.

Nothing wrong with that. Then again, if we pause to consider the actual content posting on This Is, the uselessness of this statistic outside existing for our own information is exposed. That is to say, these are the tags that have overwhelmingly dominated the last week’s worth of content.

Capsule analysis:

• More people read when we post more frequently. (File under, “Duh”.)

• Politics is a popular general subject. (File under, “You don’t say?”)

The bottom line: Sure, we’re happy. But that means nothing to anyone else.

Or, more simply put: Move along. Nothing to see here.

Still, though, thanks for stopping by. It is our honor, privilege, and pleasure.

The Age of the Lying Twit

The headline itself is the lede: “Twitter CFO says a Facebook-style filtered feed is coming, whether you like it or not”. Mathew Ingram brings the detail for GigaOm:

Earlier this year, when Twitter released its quarterly financial results, CEO Dick Costolo was asked whether the platform would ever implement a Facebook-style filtering algorithm, he hedged his answer by saying he wouldn’t “rule it out.” According to some recent comments from chief financial officer Anthony Noto, however, the company is doing a lot more than not ruling it out—it sounds like a done deal. And while that might help improve engagement with new users, it could increase the dissatisfaction some older users feel with the service.

The bottom line is simple enough; it’s just something that consumers need to remember to translate. Kind of like conversing in a foreign language, it gets easier with practice, until one day it occurs that we aren’t translating anymore, but simply thinking and processing in the form of that given language.

For end users of software technologies, what this means is that absolutely no change billed as improving our user experiences should be trusted. To wit, bloggers sometimes wonder why their hosting service deliberately tanks the user experience while telling us it is “easier” and “improved”. That is to say, these companies are welcome to make whatever changes they want, but every time they say they’re doing this for consumer benefit? No, really, it’s one thing to add a bunch of extraneous Flash layers, so that a company can feel hip for saying, “Beep-beep-boop!” but it really is hard to say that a slower, more bloated interface constitutes an easier, improved experience.