I’m using WordPress’ default theme Twenty Ten in one of my blogs, but I added some small modifications to suit my needs. One day I saw in WordPress’ admin panel that there was an update for the default theme. What first caught my attention was this: why the hell is there not an option to turn off those fucking annoying notifications?

But then, some days later there was also an update for WordPress itself. So I had two things I could update: WordPress and its default theme Twenty Ten. You’d think that they are different updates and that obviously updating one won’t update the other. It makes sense: you may want to update WordPress code but not the theme. But I wouldn’t be writing this posts if things that make sense were for those dumb, stupid WordPress developers, right?

So when you update WordPress it also updates the default theme. And there is not an option to avoid this. You are not warned. Nothing. You have to also upgrade the fucking theme because the fucking developers decided so. Thank you brilliant minds.

Now, and this is the funny part, when you upgrade WordPress and its default theme… you don’t get an updated theme! That’s right, you still get a notification that an update for WordPress’ default theme is available. Amazing. How dumb can be that?

Thankfully I had a back up of the theme with my small modifications and could restore it, but I wonder how many users have been caught off guard thanks to those dumb developers.

WordPress removes br tags, adds p tags everywhere

Dumb developers at WordPress may think we all are so dumb as they are, and so we can’t manage our own post code. They think they are smarter than you and they know better when and where to place code. because we are soooo dumb.

I just tried to add a fucking form to one of my posts, a very basic form with three fields and two buttons and no matter what I did the fucking WordPress editor added code everywhere: it added unwanted br tags just before any text field and, funny, two br tags I manually typed because I wanted one of the fields in another row, were always removed. Thank you so much dumb WordPress developers for your much appreciated help! I’m too dumb to know what I’m doing.

Plug-ins to stop or disable WordPress auto formatting

Of course I’m not the only dumb blogger that is suffering from these smart guys (well, yes, they are dumb, but since I’m way dumber that them that makes them smarter than me). You can find hundreds of blog and forum posts asking how to remove this much loved auto formatting feature, and all our smart WordPress developers do is… nothing. Just nothing. After all, they are too smart compared to us and if auto formatting is there it may be for a reason. Don’t bother them with your irrelevant problems.

So many have tried to find a solution and it comes in the form of plug-ins. Whatever WordPress developers don’t want or don’t know how to fix, they will ask you to install a plug-in. I f the plug-in doesn’t exist, write it yourself or wait. The problem is, the plug-ins I hve tried so far don’t work. While I can format the form almost to my liking, I can’t still get the code untouched. Something is added anywhere. Always.

If you want  to try for yourself maybe you are luckier than me and can get the desired effect, you have these options:

PS Disable Auto Formattin: “When editing it in the HTML mode, it stops unintended removal of br tag and p tag , either addition of p tag.”

Raw HTML: “In the end I decided to just go and write a plugin that would let me put any code or script (e.g. JavaScript) in my posts and display it to the visitor unmodified.”

Additionally you can just the code directly to your theme’s functinos.php file: Disable WordPress automatic formatting on posts using a shortcode.

Good luck with that. It worked… almost. WordPress still insisted in adding code no one aked for.

Disabling the visual editor won’t disable auto formatting

Turns out there is an option to disable the visual editor, and since you may think is this visual editor what is causing the formatting problems, you’d think that disabling it will solve the auto formatting problems. Well, not so. First, the option to disable the visual editor is hidden in your users profile options, as if they were ashamed of the monster they created. Why not add this option where it should be, in the Writing section under Settings? it is not something that will only affect some users… Then, if you finally disable it and you use the plain HTML post editor, some auto formatting will still be applied to your posts. How dumb can be that? You may be left trying to combine the HTML editor with one of the plug-ins just to see if you have more luck… I know I’ll try, and if I can come with a solution that really works, I’ll let you know (or you can point me to one solution in the comments if you know about one). Just to show you, with the visual editor disabled, I get this in my post, where 2 br tags have been added where only spaces should be, a p tag that is not closed has appeared (so much for stating that auto formatting is a way to force validating code in posts), the two br tags I placed to separate the last text and text field have disappeared, but one has then been added in a place that makes no sense:

<form id="form" style="text-align: center;">
<input name="weight" size="4" type="text" /> Peso (en kilos)<br />
<input name="height" size="4" type="text" /> Altura (en centímetros)<br />
<input onclick="calculateBMI()" name="button" type="button" value="Calcular" />
<input type="reset" value="Borrar" />
<p>Tu IMC aproximado:<br />
<input id="BodyMassIndex" name="BodyMassIndex" size="12" type="text" /></form>

Amazing. Nothing of this makes sense at all.

So all I can say for now is: fuck you WordPress developers. I appreciate all the work that is behind this blog software, but I really, really hate when you think you know better than me how to do things. It’s one of the reasons I left Windows many years ago, and one of the reasons why I may leave Firefox. It is not that you don’t know this problem exists, or that no one is asking you to solve it once and for all. You just think it is not worth your time. Well, them, fuck you. I’m really, really sick of this auto formatting shit. And you don’t care about it at all. Never did and never will.

<form id="form" style="text-align: center;">
<input name="weight" size="4" type="text" /> Peso (en kilos)<br />
<input name="height" size="4" type="text" /> Altura (en centímetros)<br />
<input onclick="calculateBMI()" name="button" type="button" value="Calcular" />
<input type="reset" value="Borrar" />
<p>Tu IMC aproximado:<br />
<input id="BodyMassIndex" name="BodyMassIndex" size="12" type="text" /></form>

That’s why I tend to upgrade only after some months (thanks to all those brave users that go ahead and have to deal with the plethora of bugs!). The problem is that in Ubuntu sometimes there is no easy way to upgrade single programs to take advantage of new features, and when there is something I really like, I feel ‘forced’ to upgrade the whole system way before I wish I had.

Upgrading to 10.04

This time I upgraded just a month after the launch of Lucid (10.04) and one of the things that made me took the plunge earlier was the system integration with social networks, like Twitter or Facebook. Well, no luck: Gwibber, the program that makes this possible, has bugs and doesn’t let me add accounts. Thank you Mark for releasing new great features… broken.

Another good reason was that I now have a 3G connection with Vodafone and wanted to connect without having to use Betavine‘s Vodafone Mobile Connect. Again, I have had lots of problems with Network Manager (I have had problems with this program since I started to use Ubuntu like 4 or 5 years ago) and when I decided it was not worth my time dealing with that program any more, I found that I couldn’t install Vodafone Mobile Client back! BTW, it was automatically removed when I did the upgrade to Lucid (see, that’s the kind of behavior I hate so much, like what Mozilla did with the link properties context menu option in Firefox 3.6). And while I can now finally conncet I still have some problems with the 3G modem, ozerocdoff and wvdial. Great.

Anyway, I have been able to sort all the serious problems (many more than what I have actually mentioned here, but I was just telling you my reasons to upgrade so ‘soon’), and I lost the count on all the hours I have spent in doing so. A shame considering that Lucid is a LTS version (what made me feel more confident about the upgrade BTW).

My Ubuntu One review

I like the idea behind Ubuntu One (just like I like Dropbox or similar services) and if I didn’t use it before was because, as you can see, I know how Canonical works and expected lots of bugs everywhere in the first months. Now that enough time has passed and we he a new LTS version here (which is a warranty of nothing as you can see), I decided to give it a try.

So I registered a new account at Ubuntu Single Sign On and followed every step after… I got an error: I went to a page named Confirm Computer Access and to to sync my computer all I had to do was to click a button labelled Add this computer, but it just took me to a Firefox error page saying

Unable to connect
Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at localhost:54034.

What is worse, there is no single mention of this problem in Ubuntu One’s FAQ so you are left wondering what could possibly go wrong. To add insult to injury, there is not a single link in the whole Ubuntu One’s web control panel to get to that Confirm Computer Access again. No one is perfect, the process failed, but… how can I go to that fucking page again? Are you telling me that I only had one chance to sync my computer? Of course there must be a way to try to sync the computer again, but where is it Ubuntu? The only way I found to get there is through the browser history.

A well known Ubuntu One bug

It turns out this is a well known bug and it’s been reported to Launchpad (here or here for example) as far back as… September of the last year! Amazing. That’s all I have to say because I just can’t believe they made nothing in almost a year to fix this bug.

And the whole Ubuntu One site is a mess: when you are in the ‘Subscription Details’ page you have a link to cancel your subscription and a link to view your account that when clicked takes you to the ‘Your Account’ page where you can do little more than editing your details (name, email and password) and click a link that says ‘View details or make changes’ which takes you to… the previous ‘Subscription Details’ page.

But wait, it can get even more stupid. There are three other links in the ‘Your account’ page:

- Ask account related questions. All it does is take you to a page where they say “Do you have billing questions regarding your Ubuntu One account?”. This makes clear that Ubuntu One is a desperate attempt by Mark Shuttleworth to make money (more about this in a moment).

- View the machines connected to this account. Of course this takes you to an empty page since the syncing process failed. That’s where you’d expect to find a “Sync computer” option to try again but all you’ll find is a link to the installation instructions, where they describe all the steps to create a new account at Ubuntu Single Sign On and sync the computer once signed in. What they don’t tell you is what to do in case the syncing process fails.

- Set up phone syncing (beta). This is the funniest because of the ‘beta’ warning. I don’t want to imagine how it works (and that’s why in fact I didn’t bothered to follow the link).

The only option left in the control panel is a check box to subscribe by email for Ubuntu One tips and updates. There is that check box… and nothing more. There is no button to confirm or save when you check it. Brilliant.

Yes, Ubuntu One is crap

When I can finally sync my computer to Ubuntu One (and I don’t know how can I do it, I venture another wasted night trying to figure it out) I’ll update this review. But I can actually tell you that even being able to sync my computer problems may still come, and just a fast Google search will show what I’m talking about (overuse of CPU, excise RAM usage…). One quote I liked:

File syncing is unreliable, evolution contacts syncing works on some machines but not others, System/Preferences UI is irritating (combining html with desktop app SUCKS), can’t delete directories from web site, no android app.

So from my own experience and the countless bad experiences of others, the conclusion of this Ubuntu One review can’t be other than: don’t waste your time with it. Ubuntu One is crap. Use Dropbox instead. Or anything else.

Ubuntu One should have never been released to the public. It is still in Beta, just like Ubuntu itself. Why they released it anyway is something I will talk about another day (don’t miss it: subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me at Twitter).

It’s not that the plug-in doesn’t work, it’s that it works most than it should: unless there is an option that I missed, it will update your Twitter not only when you publish a new post but every time you edit one too. Maybe some bloggers find this useful but I don’t: sometimes can be good reasons to  your followers ) but what if you just edit a post because you forgot a question mark or mistyped a name?

Wait, it gets worse.

Admiyn Twitter also updates on new comments

Another ‘feature’ of Admiyn Twitter is that it will also update your Twitter status whenever a new comment is added to any of your posts. First of all, I don’t see the need for this feature: really, what’s the point of updating on once and every new comment? This could be nice for a small site with almost no activity -and no followers- or as way to have you informed of new comments, but WordPress already does this, so…

But let’s imagine that you like this ‘feature’ . Again, the plug-in works  more than it should, updating your status on new comments… even if they are not published! That’s right: I received the usual SPAM comments and guess what? Admiyn Twitter updated my status for every new SPAM comment.

Be warned: as of version 1.2, avoid Admiyn Twitter! Unt

Of course, I appreciate the work of Anderson Makiyama and any other person involved in the development of the plug-in, but it has two major flaws that I thought were worth spreading.

Really, GoDaddy sucks

The hosting is slow, the custom control panel a mess, their home is anything but user-friendly and they are constantly trying to sell you something (not that other companies don’t do this, but the way GoDaddy do it is just too intrusive, spammy and borthering the scam).

So yes, GoDaddy sucks (see for yourself), and while I still have some business with them (like this site, but I’ll try to solve this ASAP) if I were you… I’d run away.

UPDATE: this is completely true! I’m writing this with WordPress and just when I clicked “Publish” to, err, publish this post… nothing happened! The page kept loading and loading after I got that annoying “You have chosen to open…” browser message that I get every time the server times out… And that’s like one time out of every ten. How good does that talk about GoDaddy’s hosting? Yes, Godaddy sucks.

I hate it when they change something like this and:

1. They don’t warm you (like “upgrading to 3.6 will disable this and that…”).
2. They don’t give you and easy alternative (like an option to revert the change).

And when I say they don’t warm you, I don’t mean a warming in some VSN or website or list that only experts or coders visit, like Bugzilla. I mean a straight warming for end users without technical background or the time to closely follow Firefox’s development.

I wish I could easily decide if an upgrade would be worth or set in the preferences a “no thanks, don’t touch this, I really like it”. But no, they just remove whatever they please and you are left wondering where the hell does that option that you love so much gone. Believe me: when one of this changes happens I sometimes think I’m drunk or need more sleep. Just like when they suddenly decided that it was better to open new tabs just after the tab you were in instead of opening them at the far right as it has been for years. After minutes of frustration and asking myself what could I have broken I realized the kind of people I was dealing with (like the lovely Nightingale) and headed to Google just to find that thousands and thousands of Firefox users were as upset as me. See for yourself: here, here or here. Great move Firefox team.

Fortunately someone took the time to write an extension that will fix link properties menu problem (and there is an easy fix for the tabs opening order as well). What the extension won’t fix is this kind of behavior at Mozilla though.

One day Chrome and Chromium will be the leading browsers and people at Firefox will wonder how it happened.