Code is not poetry
I have been trying to work out how to add a blogroll to this page. I thought that after nearly six months of blogging, the language would be familiar to me. Regular readers may recall the angst I suffered last time I tried to engage with the blogosphere. I thought things might be different now, but of course it was just self-delusion.
I should have known I’d come across sentences like this:
“Generate Hot Friends list / cloud by ranking links in blogroll based on its associated comment number or other ways specified by admin.”
And then that smug little voice echoes in my mind:
“The beauty of web 2.0 is it’s so easy to use.”
It’s all lies and they know it. What they don’t realise is that I’m onto them. I am beginning to unravel their plots and see through their game. They – those others who laugh at editorial staff – they are beginning to make massive blunders, like the claim on the Wordpress homepage.
They say using Wordpress is easy, so why are they advertising a book called “Wordpress for Dummies”?
Here I am trying to express my exasperation, trying to make contact with other lonely editors lost in cyberspace, editors who don’t understand the words any more either – here I am doing my best to survive in a world that’s filling so fast with nonsense and claptrap that soon no one will use the real words any more and no one will speak my language. Here I am writing this little blog and Wordpress confound every attempt I make to increase my tiny readership by talking about ‘link harvests’ ‘Dcoda widgets’ , ‘web collage’ and ‘tweep roll’.
Are Wordpress part of the plot to drive editorial staff to insanity? Note the Wordpress strapline:
“Code is Poetry”.
Philip Larkin, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Pam Ayres are all poets of one sort or another, but Wordpress is not. Unlike html, poetry can be moving and sometimes readable. Has Wordpress got something against poets? Why is it trying to confuse people in this way?
The whole thing brings to mind a comment made on this blog recently, and I would like to apologise to the ‘Erect Maintainer’ for not responding sooner to his lengthy comment in defence of geeks.
He makes an important distinction between proper, anally retentive geeks – the sort of people you can rely on to download your plug-ins for you – and what he calls ‘evangelists’. He also points out that web 2.0 is not easy to use.
But then I already knew that.
