When Blog Software Attacks!

Heard several times in 2002 and 2003: “Hey, Eric, how come you don’t use a blogging package for your site instead of that goofy XML/XSLT thing you cooked up?  It would make your archive URLs easier to remember, you could let people search, and comments would be possible.”

Oh, I don’t know… maybe because once I pour everything into a system, I’m subject to its quirks and whims, whereas if I roll my own system, it’s subject to my quirks and whims—and is thus tuned to my personal expectations, built to account for what I might choose to do even if I don’t realize it?

Despite this totally sensible attitude, I eventually did migrate to a system (WordPress).  That decision just bit me, thanks to its handling of markup in a post title.  Had the markup just been stripped out, that would be one thing—annoying, but totally understandable.  But to only sort-of strip it in the post slug and drop the markup raw into the title element, thus breaking any hope of validation?  Instead of, oh, I don’t know, maybe stripping the markup from both the title element and the post slug, but otherwise leaving it alone, so that the post title could remain marked up in the document itself?

<sigh type="frustrated" />

For the record, this is not evidence that WordPress sucks.  All packages suck in some way, and each one sucks in unique ways.  Eventually, you’re going to trip over something undesirable.  Today it was my turn to take that trip.

Now the post slug of emreallyem-undoing-htmlcss is enshrined forever, because you don’t change permalinks if you can possibly avoid it.  I can avoid it here by gritting my teeth, sucking it up, and wishing I had the programming moxie (not to mention spare time) to implement my own full-featured system.

• When Blog Software Attacks! was published on Wednesday, September 15th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the WordPress category.
• There has been one reply.