thirdbIT

Dear Adobe:

I hate your website. I hate that none of the apps I’ve downloaded trial versions of can be installed without installers on my Mac. I hate looking at urls like

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=flex&loc=en%5Fus

. They are ugly. I hate that every single time I try to download something, you make me fill in the same damn form about how many people are in my company and how long it will be before I make a purchasing decision. I hate that you try to get my phone number on that form. (Note: if you make a phone number mandatory but do not validate its format, don’t be surprised if people write “hah!” in the form field. As in “hah, why would I possibly want you to call me to bug me about what I thought about your bloated proprietary software?”) I hate that you automatically check a box that says the best way to contact me is by phone. I am a geek. The best way to contact me is never, ever, ever by phone.

All of this to try out AS3. C’mon Adobe, you want me to use your platform or not? Stop making me fill in your stupid forms.

So we’ve moved the site over to Wordpress from Typo. We experimented with two rails-based blogging engines, Typo and Mephisto (which seems more popular in the rails world right now), but Wordpress is a mature and widely adopted platform and in the end it made more sense to us to go with it. We’d rather not be solving software problems others have solved a million times over. (Which is why we also won’t be producing a to-do-list app any time soon. Online to-do lists! A billion to choose from, and yet somehow, none of them make my work get done. Though actually, I just bought a copy of the PDF book Flexible Rails, since I’ve decided to pick up AS3/Flex in my spare time, and the tutorial project in the book is, of course, an online to-do list.)

I’ve been delaying posting this notice because I keep looking for a blog post I read a month ago which convinced me I ought to think about Wordpress, as it was an explanation for a rails blog running on WP, and a damn good explanation at that. But I can’t for the life of me find it again. I found several other people who moved to WP after experimenting with the rails blogging engines, but not the post I remember. The explanation was, basically: right tool for right job. WP is good tool for blogging. No need to reinvent. Etc. Except the post was more eloquent than my restatement. Oh well. Lost in the ether.

Also, Max had to run a cron job doing some voodoo the details of which I forget to keep the Typo instance in good shape. Wordpress is faster, and, we hope, more stable. (No, I am not making a comment about the stability and speed of Ruby on Rails in general, just a statement about one instance of one app on one host. YMMV.)

Anyway, Max has a script for migrating the database from Typo to WP, and he’ll post it any second now.