*sigh* Adobe really doesn’t know how to do these things. After their blogs had been mostly offline for 2 months now after some ill-conceived attempt to convert to WordPress prematurely, they are back, but what do we get? They actually made them even more ugly and more useless than ever before! I say: Damn you, Adobe! Really, it’s bad enough that you are boring us to death with Julianne Kost‘s repetition of the Photoshop manual, equally boring ponderings on Captivate and LiveCycle, weird ideas by product managers and pointless comments on usability and open source software, but the least you could do is to make it look nice and pleasing and actually have a proper navigation…. *argh*

Doesn’t anyone else think it’s weird, that a company that makes a good deal of money by selling software for creating web stuff, seems to have no clue on how to maintain their own pages? I mean, we all know that it’s a colorful patchwork of thrown together sub-systems and most of us by now probably have accepted the slowness of the forums, the dysfunctionalities of the knowledge base (I truly do understand the frustration of users there when moderating their comments; it’s just a bloody mess) and even the ugliness of the store, but now even their blogs don’t work properly anymore. Maybe switching to the bitch that is WordPress wasn’t that good an idea, after all? At least the main landing page hasn’t updated properly for several days now. *yikes* That is one of the reasons, why I’m posting that little bit of info here or else you probably wouldn’t find it: Head master of all things After Effects doc, Todd Kopriva, has updated the foreign language versions of the online help to reflect some of the CS5 goodness that English users already have. And really, Adobe, when you can spend 185 millions on gobbling up another web company, clearly you must have those few thousand bucks to hire a WordPress expert to keep your blogs straight, don’t you?

In the good old times, when we still had VHS tapes and the Internet was in its infancy, I actually went to some local comic book and collectibles shop to pick up my Babylon 5 cassettes they imported from Great Britain. I always got sweaty hands taking my newly acquired treasures home, including the one with the first two episodes of season 2 that lends this post its title. I honestly miss these little moments of excitement and joy on some level. Today it’s almost too easy to order anything. Anyway, I had some sort of revelation, in fact several, while I was upgrading my various WP installs. First, being stuck on a 1.5 MBit connection with 300 kBit upstream really sucks. Even uploading those few hundred files took several attempts and a lot of finger-crossing. Now tell me about cloud computing being the future…! Under those conditions, nobody gets anything ever done. *lol* Second, I realized that I never bothered to modify and define some of the CSS formatting when I first dabbled with creating my theme nearly 3 years ago. Or could you imagine typing comments blindly just because foreground and background color match? Exactly! I couldn’t, either. The joys of conflicting CSS rules. *sigh* So for the time being, this looks a bit incomplete and partially ugly, but I promise to straighten it out one of these days. Unlike a certain, not particularly smart person I clashed with on the After Effects forum, who after one year is no closer to understanding even the basics of the program, I’m always willing to learn and I understand a lot of this CSS stuff better today than I did 3 years ago…

As hinted yesterday, things are looking okay with WordPress 3.0, so I decided to take the plunge and updated this blog to this new and shiny version. After 2 years, I have also decided to allow comments, so people can fire back. I just hope that doesn’t mean I will be drowning in spam and have to turn it off again at some point. In any event, due to the ambiguous legal side of things, everything will be heavily moderated, so think before writing (something which I still have to work on, occasionally, too). ;-)

As I’ve written in some past ramblings, WordPress always scares me with how odd and insensible some things are actually structured in the underlying code that also drives this blog. This always makes my knees all wobbly when a new version comes out and I need to update. There’s always the chance that some new code in the core modules or some plug-in makes your elaborately crafted custom templates explode or renders entire sections unusable due to incompatibilities. However, I’m glad to report that it seems that regardless of my putting off this critical transition for a while, it seems that version 3 goes nicely together with all my stuff, which puts me in a position where I can’t possibly delay much longer. So even if you mostly probably don’t care much, there’s a good chance that this and my other pages will run on this latest version in a few days. *yippee*

More fun from the deep end of web development… Trust me, revisiting your PHP templates every few months is potentially quite confusing. What always gets me, is that WordPress is so inconsequently structured. It’s really like they couldn’t make up their minds about clean external configurability and are imposing pre-formatted HTML constructs and CSS element names where you really want things to look differently and use your own stuff. You know, what does "pp" in your style sheet really mean and these sorts of things. Ultimately you still end up digging into their default includes instead of just working with your theme files, and that can be quite dangerous and you really spend some time just searching for those tiny two line global function calls to polish them up. *argh* Even with your own comments, you then spend another good load of time to figure out how it all goes together. No fun at all!

A very observant visitor of my blog pointed me at a wrong link on the start page that has been lingering there ever since. I now fixed the problem and also took the opportunity to do some other minor adjustments on the start page. I will continue to sprinkle in these little fixes and adjustments as I have time, but you should not notice any of that when visiting this site. It’s mostly boring stuff such as straightening out the style sheets and fixing a few templates. I hope to to these things in preparation for WordPress version 3, which will then hopefully be a bit easier to handle with the corrections already in place.

While I have had several more generic posts on software development in the past, this one kinda illustrates the point of the intricacies quite well in more detail. However, I do not fully agree with some of what is written there.

On a funny (or not so funny) side note, John Nacks comment reveals a few more failures common to many software development efforts:

Yepp, we are on 2.8.2 now with all the latest shiz, so once more this little hideout should be relatively watertight. Commenting is still disabled and I’m not gonna change that any time soon. Wouldn’t wanna get spammers as John Nack, would we? If you still have anything important to say, just use the feedback form or send a mail and I’ll make it appear, where appropriate. I’ve also corrected some formatting errors that had crept in during the last update, in case you ever stumbled upon those.

…or rather on WordPress 2.8 now. Yepp, I’m through with updating everything now. Everything went better than I had anticipated, so I’m ahead of schedule. For your convenience, I’ve added some more listings here and there, which offers yet another way of visually searching e.g. the After Effects Error Code Database and gives a good impression of the sheer number of entries (currently: 30 entries per page x 11 pages ~ 300 entries).