nektros - Cynicism in a Hot Dish

The ubiquitous spiel of gushing words outlining one’s exact depth of adoration for their blogging platform of choice is one of the more useless forms blog posts are able to take on. In my earliest blogging days just under two years ago, my first Wordpress rant managed to incorporate enough new and useful information to collectively enlighten the noggin of a lone blueberry scone.

Simply put, no-one wants to be told why they use what they already use, or why they should use something different to what they already use. Furthermore – before anyone puts the last sentence up for Nobel laureate contention – actually eking out something useful from a blogging platform rhapsody by convincing a reader to test drive or even switch to your object of affection is a rare feat.

Simplier putter (I mentioned my laureate worthiness, didn’t I?), posts such as the one you’re already a third of the way through are nothing more than bleating, self-assuring filler.

So, after being allotted a small corner of pixels on We Love Textpattern, yet being mindful of perpetuating the core spirit of you-disagreein’-with-me doucheasses hibernating in all pockets of cyberspace, I’ll keep my infatuation with the Textpattern CMS powering this site to a bare minimum falling just short of ‘mindless raving rabble’.

Textile: valid and good semantic markup

While I sometimes wish for the MySQL gods to resurrect my old database and a particular post where I proudly proclaimed no damn of any sort being given about the 100 or so validation errors once spouted by this site – we all need an embarrassing tidbit borne from immaturity to fall back on when confronted with a current one, after all – I now strive to maintain a valid site, if for no better reason than to proclaim, “& should be &! Now bow before me and wipe my validation error crushing boots, you twit!”

Despite a few hiccups I’ve had with Textile, my attachment to it has surmounted all ironic invalid code generation through its punching of my gut hard enough to set off my lightbulb moment that not only does it aid my valid code quest, but it also encourages this site to squeeze itself together with semantic markup.

Hence, my being able to append “And put your headings in heading tags, not more frickin’ dividers!” to my favourite house party opening statement, and making you feel less worthy, and rightly so.

Templating: sections, pages and forms

One argument in favour of Wordpress – which I agree with – is the endless collection of themes its users have access to, and the ease with which they are able to install them.

The process of theme installation for Textpattern (for those unaware of the mcw templates plugin, that is) goes somewhere along the lines of renouncing all claims of faith in common decency and investing in a brand new career instructing others in the fine art of uncontrollable sobbing.

However, getting past “Error on line 134 … whoops, still an error on line 29 … nope, another error on that first line, boofhead” messages, there is a method to the seeming madness of Textpattern’s presentation system. There is one term which spirals down the many pluses of the sections, page and forms which make up a Textpattern theme: Textpattern template tags.

Though two years free from the Wordpress loop and the oftentimes furniture throwing inducing complexity of its template tags may have strengthened my personal avowal to steer clear of even uttering the damn thing’s name ever again, Textpattern by comparison is the wizened professor who helps you learn everything you need to know, while doing 90% of your homework.

Spam: canned (seriously, laureate)

Lastly – to cut off what would otherwise never end with the strongest point of all – Textpattern is a spam assassin.

When having no spam protection plugins in place and instead using a simple ‘preview’ comment function (as you can see below) results in absolutely zero spam comments coming through – as opposed to upwards of a thousand a day with three spam protection plugins in place, one of which marks several readers as spammers themselves cough Akismet – you know you have a winner on your hands.

Stayed tuned for the blueberry scone’s take on its willingness to convert to Textpattern.