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”)

The Macbook of Theseus

My computer died recently. Was on vacation and it stopped booting up. Something about it, the timing perhaps, made me think it was the bad death.

But, I still hoped. I hoped it was the 3rd party charger I had with me, so waited until I got home to use the original.

Then I made an appointment with Apple, hoping a simple reset of some sort could help. And indeed there was about two minutes where my machine was connected the service computer that it looked like we would be able to flash and reinstall the firmware.

Alas, it was not meant to be, it threw up errors.

It was the bad death, the motherboard would need to be replaced, and because of the way this Macbook is made, it would take my harddrive with it.

It is one thing to have a back up strategy, and another to have to exercise that strategy.

My important files are kept on a local Nextcloud, synced with multiple devices. I keep a back up of my writing specifically on my Dropbox.

I have a Time Machine, but it had been giving me issues, issues which were a perpetual # 3 on the todo list. The last backup I had was January 2024.

I keep a lot of my nerdy programming projects on a Pi Zero I have set up just to be a git server and have started moving more to my online repository (https://code.jacobhaddon.com)

So. I was fairly confident I was ok. Fairly. Mostly. I was an anxious mess. Sigh.

It was only made worse when I got my computer back and discovered the January backup was corrupt, and no data could be retrieved. I had a June 2023 back up, it worked fine, and filled in some of the concern in my heart.

You see everything important was already on Nextcloud and Dropbox… I hoped. Because without the backup I couldn’t be sure, and that being sure part is what I needed as a part of the backup plan.

A few things were lost, things I can remake or download easily.

And the computer itself? The following were replaced:

  • Logic board (which includes HDD and RAM)
  • Touch ID board
  • I/O Board x2

Which means I think the only thing in there original is the battery… which I kinda wish had been replaced as well.

I didn’t lose anything other than some sleep, but I am not happy with the way things went with this effort. So right now I am still planning on how I’m going to make a better backup plan. My previous confidence seems was partially based on the idea I could rip the machine open and get to the hard drive if push came to shove.

Which is no longer the case.

Check your backups. Keep your important things in multiple places. Print, publish, push to keep things safe.

Be safe out there.