I’ve been updating my online courses and websites. The Cornrows.co.uk Learning Center was broken. So I upgraded the courseware, and guess what? It’s still broken.
Thing is, I know how to fix it. I’m just not going to.
I’m just tired of fighting the software.
Thusfar, when I can, I use open source applications because they’re usually better. I’m willing to pay when I need to, but I learned my lesson about that many years ago. Companies stagnate, fall, and have a “works for me so it should work for you” mentality. Communities are usually more stable…until recently anyway.
For the past few years, it’s like the geeks (of which I’m one and not ashamed) have forgotten that programming isn’t the only profession that requires a lot of attention. Not everyone is doing that for a living, and even those who are, aren’t all into web development. If I was just an artist, I would have no way of knowing how to fix the multitude of bugs and errors one by one. Even though I can fix a good bit of what I come across, modifying them means I’m going to have issues on the next upgrade. So I try to avoid that if possible.
It’s apparently too much to ask that people test something before releasing it as a stable version. By test I mean hand it out to some people who aren’t developers. I mean schoolteachers and other people who know how to use a computer, but don’t know php or how to do anything above changing file permissions or something.
So this time, I’m just done promoting stuff that breaks when you barely touch it by using it anymore. I’m now leaning towards the happy medium between open source and buy-in-the-box: sponsored applications. I can tell Google or Yahoo that something is broken, and they will fix it. They pay people well people to do that, and yet can offer the services for free because some people are getting advertising every time they do the dang thing right. People smile and buy stuff so I don’t have to break my brain and waste my time fixing something that’s just going to be broken again on the next “upgrade”.
So as of today, I’m putting my free educational content into a truly stable CMS, maybe blog style, and using already existing social networks to keep track of everybody. I don’t really need more than that.
