This whole situation also has me rethinking php altogether. Php was not the second coming of Christ. It basically became the language of choice for lack of better options at the time its development reached the level of being very useful. ASP.net was just too crazy for most of us at the time. It still is.
Since then, we’ve got AJAX, Ruby on Rails, and others. They are great, but I couldn’t find any content management systems that are as easy to install and get running as the php ones that are out there. If someone knows of one that would work on most relatively inexpensive hosts, please let me know. As it stands, I haven’t seen one yet, and I don’t know if the reason is that they are impossible to create or that nobody has put the time into creating one…at least not one that is free.
…and speaking of free, I’m not sure if some developers are aware just how much people are willing to pay for something that just fucking works. Again, the getting used to being treated like slaves thing. I’ve donated to plugins before, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Nobody grown feels entitled to basically use someone endlessly with no feedback and no payback. Managed WordPress hosting is flying off the shelves simply for that reason.
There are lessons in this for all of us. For me, probably not the average user, but one who would rather spend their time on the content instead of the programming, it is that it’s better to be on the customer side of this than the webmaster side of this. This way, if stuff doesn’t work, I get to take my money and go elsewhere, not argue with developers who feel like they’re doing me a favor that entitles them to treat me like shit even when something doesn’t work. When simply stating that if something becomes unusable, people just won’t use it, and will just move on to something that works becomes ingratitude rather than a fact…it’s time for people like me to take a hard look at not just what but who we’re relying on to keep our sites running.
So little by little, I think I’ll be making html pages of all of my important posts, and maybe shopping around for managed WordPress hosting. I get the Open Source thing. I believe in it. The problem is that what used to be volunteers who actually believed in their projects, some of whom were developing things so that they could build a base for paid services and applications but still believed and wanted to help the community, is now people who feel they should be getting paid for what they do but aren’t. I think that if someone wants to get paid, they should go into business and not bother about community. I have no problems with that whatsoever, and no judgement. It’s a bad thing when someone is giving away their services for free when they don’t have to or don’t feel that they should. So I will no longer be taking any free services from people who feel they should be getting paid for them, and that I am a bad person for using them, and ungrateful if I mention that something may be wrong.
I don’t need people trying to make me feel bad or that I am taking advantage of them because I didn’t pay them for something they offered for free. Seriously, I would rather be a customer than to be treated like an exploiter because I don’t suck someone’s ass hole hard enough.
