I think our first talk was a success. It certainly exceeded my expectations and I hope that most of those who were there feel the same. I was happy to see that a lot of us didn’t just leave, but stayed to enjoy conversation with other visitors. I hope this will become even more common and expected.

I got a chance to talk to several people I wanted to meet or whom haven’t seen in a long time and I immensely enjoyed myself. Our conversations covered many topic, one of which was WordPress where I made some statements that on reflection probably deserve an explanation.

I said that WordPress sucks.

This is not true and I don’t actually mean it, but it is as true as what wordpress.org has to say about its product:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

I use WordPress, but I can’t say I enjoy the experience. It’s certainly not worse than most similar stuff out there, but I think best have moved on. I don’t find default installation particularly pleasant to look at, its usability is questionable and in an age of WYSIWYG editors and online spell checkers, it’s hardly state-of-the-art either.

It’s still a good software and I wouldn’t nag, if the page didn’t also say:

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

Now that is pure crap. It would take too long to list everything I believe they got wrong, so I’ll concentrate on a couple of issues to illustrate my frustrations.

There are things that are plain stupid. Theme editor tells me I could edit my template directly, if I made files writable. True, and I wouldn’t be the only person who could do that anymore. So you have a theme editor that is either useless or a security problem.

And then there are things like user levels. As an administrator of WordPress you have to decide what level a user should be, but there’s not even a word of explanation in user interface about what that means. No hint, nothing. Sure, it’s explained in wordpress documentation, but is there a link to contextual help available on that screen? To any help whatsoever? No.

It’s stuff like this that makes me think WordPress has a long way to go for an average user.

A while ago I agreed to organizing a series of talks about web and web technologies. They were and will be the cause for occasional outburst of Slovene on this blog. As Slovene speaking readers already know, the first one will be tomorrow at 19.00 in Cyberpipe , which is a rather cool place I almost never visit, because I’m weird and don’t like it all that much. But if you’re into net art, free wifi, cyber cafe and like meeting like-minded people, than it’s the place for you in Ljubljana.

I agreed to a job with no salary, fame or groupies and I did it whorishly quickly, because I thought it would be really cool to get Slovenian web community be, well, more communal. A better thinker than me would certainly notice that I’m not actually necessary for this plan to work and so could leave this task to someone else. But I’m as much a sucker for leaving my mark and doing it my way as any dog out there. Or better a cat. Yes, definitely a cat. Tomcat that is.

So, here we are, on the eve of first talk, which I’m certain will be a great (success) as all others will be and I’m working on November’s and December’s schedule, which are not coming together as easily as I’ve hoped. Series is aimed at experienced part of community and there are awfully lot of Wednesdays for something as small as Slovenia . I mean 20 thousand square kilometers and 2 million people. If any smaller it wouldn’t be a country, it would be a city.

Therefore I’m asking both of my readers which option is least annoying:

1. Forget a regular schedule. Have a talk when you can, but let it be worthwhile.
2. Have a regular schedule, but keep it regular with more basic talks (e.g. how to build your first web page).
3. Have a regular schedule, but keep it regular by having regular speakers.

I like variety, even in food, although between you and me, I could eat pasta every day. I’d prefer to have as many different speakers as possible, but I’d rather listen to the same lot (if good) then nobody or even worse, to talks I can’t care about anymore. How about you?

P.S: If there’s anyone that would like to give a talk and is willing to come to Cyberpipe, please let me know. Reasonable costs of transportation can be reimbursed.

Another Slovenian announcement…

Jutri, v sredo 5. oktobra ob 19:00, bo Jure Koren v Kiberpipi predaval o varni uporabi jezika PHP na spletu.

Na predavanje ste vabljeni vsi, ki bi se radi pobližje seznanili s pastmi PHP-ja ali pa si želite spoznati in družiti z drugimi spletnimi ustvarjalci.

Naslednji teden pa nadaljujemo s predavanjem Frya o mikroformatih .