When Computer Stuff Came in Books

I’m sitting in the Barnes and Noble near my house where I used to work. That’s not directly related to this post, but it is a part of me, my space.

Something Goldberg talks about in Writing Down the Bones that if you don’t know where to start, start with where you are.

I am sitting in a building that didn’t just pay my salary, didn’t just fuel my love for books, it fueled my love for computers.

You see, used to be, the best way to get information on computers, to learn a new language or program was to buy a book. A big tome of a book that weighed in at $50 and sometimes if you were lucky came with a CD.

It was here i got the books i used to learn HTML, JavaScript, CSS. Perl and PHP. I got my first Linux book here (Red Hat 4.0).

All the things I used to build websites for fun and profit. I used to give HTML lessons at the info dest using pen and paper. I got a programming gig because I knew the answers, and helped them find books.

And it was from here, from those books, many of which I still have, that I found WordPress and re-built my website from a static site I updated occasionally to a dynamic site with a database that I updated occasionally.

This WordPress mess has me thinking again about websites, and how we make them, and how we go about learning what do to put them together.

Someone made the comment that we ‘don’t open up notepad.exe and write them by hand anymore these days’ and I thought, but… why not?

And I don’t mean e-commerce, or social media. I don’t mean the complicated sites that we use like Google Docs.

I mean, our sites. Our personal sites.

I’ve coded more sites by hand than the average person, even the average website having person. I used to do it for a living (yes, I used notepad.exe) and had many of my own things online made that way.

I’ve been looking into Jekyll for a static site generator. It is nice, has lots of functionality, and in no way is easier than writing things by hand. It is just writing things by hand for a specific program.

I will say it is easier than converting a site by hand for sure, especially if you are a nerd like me and already write your posts in markdown before you post them.

This isn’t a call to go back to the HARD way of making sites. This is rather a request to re-assess what is actually the HARD way.

This is just rambling at this point. Perhaps it is the caffeine. I’ve nearly finished a quick tutorial on HTML which I hope to post soon, just to show that it is simple to create.

I think we have it in our heads that a website must be grand and have things like hamburger menus and whatever that slidy thing does, and whatnot.

And in the end, we are there to read what you write. Maybe watch your video, or listen to your song. (Certainly NOT click on any ads)

And really, it could be just like we are. A work in progress, a little scatter brained, perhaps with mismatched socks.

On This WordPress Mess

There is a longer rant here that covers a lot of the things I wanted to rant about, so rather than repeat it, I’ll just start with a simple:

This. (Point to the sky gif)

I do want to talk about the implications of this whole thing. Because it is the fact that the WordPress users on WP Engine got cut off from the Wordpress.org resources that is the crucial part here. 

Automattic, or the Foundation, or .org, whoever Matt was representing at that time, cut off the theme and plugin library at Wordpress.org to all the WordPress users hosted on WP Engine. Because it is them, the WordPress users, that are getting hurt in this mess.

You see, the connection to Wordpress.org isn’t an extra, it isn’t something you turn on or add in, it is a base component of a WordPress install. And Matt just showed every Wordpress user that it can be cut off at a moment’s notice at his whim.

Cutting off updates to plugins and themes. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if it cut off updates to WordPress itself. 

If Wordpress.org isn’t neutral (within reason1) in these matters, then it should not be advertised as infrastructure. And if any one of us who use WordPress should fear being cut off and having to manually install updates to our websites at anytime, well, then maybe we all need to be thinking and preparing for that. 

Because if I was hosted on WP Engine I would sure as hell be looking to get my site, my livelihood in some cases, off of WordPress. 

And sure, there is an argument that the .org site doesn’t owe its infrastructure to anyone. Because it is true, they don’t. But if that is their actual stance, if that is the line that they are going to draw in the sand then it needs to be removed from the core of WordPress. Decide how they will vet the users they plan to support, make it a plugin with a login or something, but stop pretending it is part of the base install of WordPress. 

Because right now we cannot trust Wordpress.org to be there when we need them, which means we have to question if we can trust WordPress at all in the future. 

Or maybe even in the present. 


  1. Fuck Terfs ↩︎

This is a WordPerfect Post

One day this summer I had, via a random internet post, nostalgia for something I never used: WordPerfect for DOS.

I started WordPerfect with version 6.0a (or something similar), on Windows 95. My parents had WordPerfect, but the site of that blue screen with just a blinking cursor scared me off.

There was a printout of the different key commands that sat onmtop of our keyboard, reminding me of this program made of, no doubt, pure dark magic.

And yet here we are.

I looked up how to start FreeDOS, which is where this story really started. It was the 20th for FreeDOS and I thought it would be fun to run it under qemu.

So, while on vacation watching the summer Olympics, I started following tutorials and learning how to run anything, much less FreeDOS under qemu.

(I have tried and failed many times to get virtual box running on Fedora for my Windows 2000 needs…)

And once it was up and running, then came the next question: now wat?

The answer seemed to be, for some reason: WordPerfect. So, more tutorials, more tweaks and there it was, that blue screen from my youth that I dreaded so.

And now, it is sorta calming, sorta quaint. Still very blue. Ok, so I figured out how to change that, and it is now an orange, which I do like better.

I should not have been surprised at the features in WordPerfect for DOS, but I was. It was the standard at the time. I had not realized the blue screen was the writing mode, it is the ‘Text View’ where you input, and there is in fact a graphical view that shows the actual page layout.

That separation of writing and layout was ahead of its time, I think.

So, am I going to follow Martin and Walton in the path of only writing in obscure ancient word processors? No… Just another tool, another thing to have to play with, to feed the distracted mind to get the fingers dancing from time to time.

Running WP under FreeDOS has one quirk for sure: you can’t easily transfer files from the virtual machine to the main computer. For that, I made a quick bash script which mounts the image, copies the fires to the main machine, and unmounts. Not sophisticated, but functional.

From there, the wpd files can be opened into LibreOffice, or I can, as I did with this, simply save them as txt files.

(Fun fact, WordPerfect spell check did not recognize “internet” as a word, and Firefox did not know “WordPerfect”)