Posts tagged 'bugs'
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One of those things… I assumed Wordpress was a mature platform, and it is, but there's a bunch of weird interactions between, for instance, Markdown and post by email. In this case, the post I wrote last night cut off early, and it took me a second to figure out why, but I think I know.
There's an old standard for signature lines that dates back to Usenet and the early days of email. A signature would be demarcated by "– ", that is, two dashes and a space on a line by themselves. Wordpress is supposed to prune off email signatures… but.
Markdown uses multiple dashes on a line by themselves as a horizontal separator.
Google, I think, trims excess whitespace.
Can you guess where this is going?
I used post by email once a couple weeks ago, and my email signature got attached to the blogpost. I used post by email last night, and everything below my first horizontal separator got pruned. lol what?
Tumblr has issues, but their markdown and post by email were about all I could ask for—simple, clean, error-free. Wordpress is … leaving a lot to be desired.
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To begin, it helps to understand that things get under my skin easily. I was running Word 2004 on a recent Intel Mac, and spent two hours toggling options and configuring my environment to try to get rid of a 50 ms lag in characters appearing on screen. (I never was able to, and ended up using Word 2010 on a PC to do that piece of work.) I argued with a guy for three hours about the use of a particular piece of iconography and the role of consistency in UI design, because a visual confusion was causing me thirty seconds of inconvenience per day.
So basically, I'm an asshole (to many of you) or particular ("OCD") about a couple things, which can be roughly boiled down to "responsiveness" and "flow". I'll upgrade my phone to reduce typing lag, I won't use a device that's too old if fast tasks aren't fast—app switching, typing, mouse input—and I hate chrome, animation, and interfaces that reduce application interaction speed. This leads into flow: if a button isn't clear after using it five times, or I mis-hit a menu because my understanding of an app is different from the designers' intent, I get increasingly frustrated. Adobe Reader using the Windows XP file dialog for saving/opening files (as opposed to the Windows 7 version) is one of my pet peeves. Thus, the main reason I prefer OS X is that there are so few exceptions: Apple's "update or get left behind" dictum to software developers is, in my mind, a virtue, because when everything is up-to-date everything behaves predictably and I can flow more easily.