November 27, 2009
Empty For Redux
Far back in the mists of ancient time, commenting on one of the very first WT posts, my old friend Dan had this to say about Movable Type:
Isn't MT an absolute joy? The more I use it, the more I get a thrill at the way it meekly and rather perfectly does its job and doesn't demand anything in return. Sort of like an efficient public-sector librarian. The real antithesis of your Microsoft Bloatware all-singing all-dancing West-End production. Let's hear it for software which doesn't insult your intelligence!
I mean, can you imagine: Microsoft buy Moveable Type:
"It looks like you're writing a blog entry. Would you like some help?"
Those days are gone. I fucking hate MT4. The gaudy, self-congratulatory, overweight obstructive shitpile that is its current interface is to the old MT what Windows is to Mac -- and I mean Windows Me, not anything vaguely tolerable like XP. It is cluttered, dog slow and fucking useless.
And intrusive. It thinks it knows best. It is, of course, wrong.
MT's security has always been a bit shit. Now they've plastered all kinds of crap over the top to try to stop up the holes, and who knows? Maybe it would work -- if it would fucking work. Instead, it just makes it actually impossible for my own -- never beaten, btw -- spam avoidance measure to run at all, and instead demands my whole site be substantially restructured or forego comments.
FUCK OFF!
I'm not interested in your clunky paraphernalia of user registrations and such. And I'm not interested in your enforcement of irrelevant accessibility guidelines. And I don't want to scrub through a bunch of fucking pop-up menus just to change an entry's excerpt.
Hate. Hate. Hate.
At the moment I'm using an unholy bodge to get comments working, a sort of Frankenstein monster stitched together from parallel installs of MT3 and 4. This is clearly a very bad idea, probably leaving my whole database in some hopelessly broken state only days away from catastrophic failure, but the alternatives are even less appealing. Probably the best option is just to downgrade -- but then I don't think I'd be able properly to do what I am now, which is posting from my phone.
It's a dilemma.
In the meantime, if you haven't upgraded to MT4, my advice is: don't. It sucks.
Posted by matt at November 27, 2009 1:19 AM