• I’m hand-coding this list because I don’t trust WYSIWYG
• Some code highlighting would be really nice right now
• WP is still coded to support PHP 4
• I’m the only one who needs backend access
• I never save drafts or revert to prior revisions
• My pages change about every 9 months
• I’ve never needed to swap themes
• I always resize images and embed media manually
• Categories, tags and search are unnecessary on a site this size*

These facts haven’t changed in 8 years. WordPress changes constantly. And the more I work on db-driven sites, the more I realize they’re just skins over the db schema. So if my needs don’t change, and the data doesn’t change, why do I have to update every month? To patch holes in features I don’t use, add some new ones, arbitrarily rename template functions, and occasionally rearrange the backend.

I will continue to develop WordPress for clients because it perfectly meets a company’s needs, just not mine. Plus, as a developer, there’s a certain barrier to learning when so many safety nets are in place.** I think the best (only?) way to grow is by knowing every line of code, making mistakes, fixing them, then trying something new that’ll probably break too. Here are my goals for something else:

• Strong separation of data, logic and presentation (cool kids say MVC)
• Static pages; dynamic posts
• Lowest-level functionality (e.g. htpasswd beats session auth)
• Threaded commenting (for my audience of 3)
• Code highlighting in the backend
• SQLite?

*Regardless, Googling site:danrashid.com works fine.

**User privileges, password retrieval, fallback templates, automatic updating, update reversion, post revisions, automatic draft saving, email notifications… all wonderful things if you don’t want to break stuff. Then again, 2.7 just broke my background image function.

I haven’t had to wear my winter coat since halfway through Mississippi on my drive down 10 months ago. Granted, I had a fever.

Ah the holidays — so calm, so peaceful. I better shut this thing down.

On a totally related note, I’m dumping WordPress at the earliest convenience. Here are some reasons why:

• I know HTML.

Amaya looks good.

This is what happens at 11:30PM on a Wednesday when I can’t go to bed until DNS propagates and tells me if anything broke.

It really was a hell of a show. The effects spoke for themselves (YouTube doesn’t do ‘em justice), but the band… I didn’t think it was possible to play NIN that cleanly live. Many songs sounded cleaner than the album version. Despite the 3D film fall through, I hope they can at least release some audio.

Let’s see what the next revision brings.

Erm, I just realized the new drummer is 20. Lucky bastard. That’s like Tommy playing for the Stones.

I’ve been living away from home for a while and usually don’t fly in until Dec 23ish. Years before, it would have been in pain in the ass to either a) fly home with gifts in checked luggage, or b) race around Metro Detroit buying shit on Dec 24th. I’ve done both and neither is remotely convenient.

But now that airlines are charging fees for checked luggage, it’s also cheaper to buy online and ship home. My question is: How much luggage do you need to be carrying until shipping yourself freight would be cheaper than airfare?

*I almost typed “I ♥ the Internet,” but didn’t want to confuse it with this:

I think he just ate something greasy.

I haven’t installed any graphics software on this partition yet and was amazed to discover that MS Paint can save 24-bit PNGs. When did that happen?

I’m pretty much hooked on exploring different platforms, tools and ports at the moment. At the end of the day, working in Photoshop, writing code, and testing in Firefox and native IE without having to reboot feels the best. On top of that, Eclipse caters to a level of complexity that I don’t need and Dreamweaver CS4 is a drastic improvement over its predecessors. Subversion and ssh are a wash, as they’ve been well ported everywhere.

Excluding download time, it only takes about 10 minutes to setup Apache2, MySQL 5 and PHP 5 on Windows without installers. Apt takes zero minutes, but I’d still be left with an OS that needs manual configuration to find my 2nd monitor, drains my battery while asleep, can’t run WOW over 10fps, freezes on shutdown, sometimes crashes X.org on sleep, doesn’t safely undock, and makes me feel like a bad person for installing flashplugin-NONFREE. And that’s with an Intel-based laptop.

I probably should’ve bought a Mac, but it’s fun to mess around with this thing.

Yesterday we contracted a dedicated server for $125/mo. This morning CS4 arrived. A couple hours ago I realized the majesty of MacPorts. Naturally it seemed like a good time to wipe the drive (my favorite hobby). Lots of progress bars happening (some not so graphical).

Here’s an exception, found via I Love Typography.