Epic Banality

I suffer from some strange compulsions. There are the simple ones, like the fact that all the cash in my wallet must be sorted by denomination and series date and if I see some change sitting on a table or a counter I feel the need to arrange it in an orderly fashion. When I eat at In’n Out Burger I have two hamburgers—no cheese—and some fries and consume them thusly: burger, fries, burger. It must be this way. I generally like symmetry and order and my family has categorized me as “anal” since middle school. There are also the more annoying ones, like the resulting problem with the table IDs in Wordpress and the mess and hell that is the newest version (2.6).

Wordpress 2.6 introduced something that, at first, seemed like a damn cool feature: it keeps track of revisions. Every time I change a post it keeps a history of the changes. Cool, very cool. That is, until you combine it with their auto save feature and the fact that it’s just not a very well thought out system. It could be—and I hope they do something about it—but for now it grates on my compulsion for tidiness in data.

The trouble begins with auto save. If I’m foolish enough to begin composing an entry in their admin panel and don’t have a title in mind yet, it’ll auto save. That becomes a revision with no title. It messes up my slug title (permalink) which has to be changed by hand and every time it saves, it saves a copy of the whole entry. As you can imagine, the database starts filling up quickly. This is really bad for someone like me who makes little changes on a regular basis. A period here, a single word change there, etc. I change one word and bam! There’s a new copy of the whole thing.

To add insult to injury, if you change a category or something like that, you get another entry. Save the entry and then publish? Two copies—even if you don’t change any of the text. This feature would be better if it used diffs or something. I don’t know exactly since this isn’t my area of expertise, but something should be done. In its current state the application is limited and I’m not even sure what. The revision system is simply a terribly thought out “feature.” Fortunately, it can be disabled and auto save can be set to a reasonable value. Why this isn’t something that can be set in the control panel is beyond me.

Aside from the technical annoyances, this plagued my compulsion so badly that I exported all my posts and pages, cleared the databases and rebuilt the whole blog: posts, comments, users and everything. See, while looking at the raw data—something I should never do unless I have to—I noticed all kinds of “junk” that really bothered me. I even trashed the “admin” account and made myself user #1. This took some time and, realistically, was totally unnecessary.

On the upside, things are nice and clean now and I have a better grasp of the data structure of Wordpress. The perfectionist in me wants to go back to writing my own blog software, but I simply don’t have the time for that silliness anymore.

Aside from my boring statements about Wordpress, I have a few rants to touch on today:

The first comes in the form of a client of mine. I mentioned him a bit back in a previous entry and referred to him as a “buddy.” He is too, but he also has this habit of pissing me off on a regular basis. When he needs something computer related he’ll call and call and call and call and call and… you get the idea. He’ll write me a bunch of emails. The trouble is, everything is an emergency with this guy—everything. I wrote him last night, responding to an email, specifically informing him that he was only to call me in the event of an emergency. I’d covered all his other crap in my email.

So what did he do? He calls me less than an hour later and then follows it up with an email. Why? He and his friend tried to install Microsoft Excel on some machine and screwed up. Today, while working on a much more important and time consuming process, he called again and again. It’s really annoying and when you’re as busy as I was today, the aggravation of his phone calls will do little other than derail someone like me. No matter how many times I explain this, he keeps it up. Some friends tell me he’s doing cocaine again, so maybe that’s it.

The second comes from this cheap ass personal assistant I do work for at a real estate company. A week ago she talked me down on the price I bid for a job doing some countertops on one of their rentals. I only took the price—as it was insulting—because work is slow right now. She inspected the property today and calls me and tries asks me if she can “knock off $40 from the invoice” because I didn’t remove all the original vinyl floor. This is after I’d already reduced the price by close to $200. I told her, “Sure, I’ll take off $40, if you want to start at the original price.” She changed her tune. I’m already the lowest bidder and she still has to try and pinch pennies. In the future, I’ll be changing my tactics.

I really hope business grows enough over the next few months so I can just start saying, “You know, I’m way too booked to even deal with this. Penny pinch someone else, I have paying clients.”

So yeah. That’s it. K.L. is probably in California right now so I have Saturday night to myself. And tonight. That explains why I had enough spare time to care about the tidiness of my database!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Rant, Site Related, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.