Send Me On my Way - A Farewell to My Opera
Saturday, 26. April 2008, 06:48:04
Well, this is it. My final blog entry on here. I'm not leaving the Opera community (I'll still participate on the forums), but I am shutting down the blog. Ever since I started this up, I've been itching to have a self-hosted blog that I could control and skin myself. After looking around, I settled on WordPress. Not content with the poor code quality of the Themes WordPress has to offer (the designs are great, the code however just doesn't meet my stringent needs), I decided to learn how to write my own (my way).
One year later, that project has taken on a life of its own, and will be released as a free download to anyone who wants it. I'm not going to release any details about it just yet, since it's undergoing beta testing (it's surprisingly rock solid stable - I'm just adding some last-minute features and making sure it's 2.5.x compatible while also supporting older 2.x installations).
So, what made me want to shut this blog down? Quite a few things. To start:
- My Opera.com's code is just crap. I can't edit the underlying HTML - only the CSS. Given the way I code, that's just unacceptable. For a company that preaches about Web standards, seeing what passes for HTML on My Opera just makes me sick.
- The features suck. I've seen message boards with more advanced features than this. For example, non-My Opera users show up as "anonymous" whenever they leave a comment. I also cannot approve or deny comments on an individual basis.
- The stats tracking "feature" doesn't work half the time, and when it does, it doesn't tell me anything useful.
- The stupid Google search bar at the top in the header bar. Look, I already have a blog search feature here. I don't need another one, especially one I have no control over removing to begin with. Not only does it confuse visitors, but it also looks TERRIBLE.
- Speaking of other things I can't move (or remove), I have no control over where the sidebar items are placed. Giving people the ability to customize the appearance of their blogs - and I don't mean writing a custom stylesheet either - would really go a long way towards enticing people to use the blogs here.
- I also can't use the RSS feed on some forums. The whole point of blogging is to share information and experiences with others - and RSS is one of the ways that people do that. Not being able to syndicate a feed so that the title of the most recent blog entry cannot be shown on a forum profile defeats the purpose, which really dissuaded me from blogging here in the first place. Nothing I can do about that now anyway, so oh well.
And that's just the tip of the proverbial ice berg. Look, it's obvious this isn't working out, so I'm just going to have to let this go and move on to greener pastures. The service here is adequate for interacting with other My Opera users, but given that a lot of the people who are aware of Opera (even if only as a "minor browser" prefer Firefox, they're not going to want to use this site or service anyway. I don't know - maybe it has to do with the Cult of Firefox and their stupid Book of Mozilla, but for whatever reason (and a lot of it probably has to do with Opera's seeming inability to market itself to desktop browser users) they just don't care.
So here I am, packing up and shipping out. From now on I'll be blogging on my personal Web site, which will also be used to promote my freelance consulting and development work for the forseeable future. Yes, the site will look bare at first design-wise. Given that I had to deal with a family crisis the past two months, and having to handle other issues that have come up, i really haven't given that much thought to an actual design for the site (or put in the time required to create a good one). I've tossed a few ideas around, one of which showed a lot of promise, but I'd rather have something functional now than perfect six months later, if you know what I mean.
I'll be posting my weekly videos there (I'll be writing them a few weeks in advance and have them set to auto-publish for those times when I'm away) so those will be published regularly like they should have. I'll also be blogging about other things though whenever they catch my eye or strike my fancy. But it'll be far more frequent and regularly than what I was doing here, I assure you of that. And if I ever fall behind on my blogging there, I'll just have the evil monkey that lives in Chris Griffin's closet point his finger at me while giving me an angry look. Either that or I'll just kidnap the shock monkey from Ill Will Press and just let it electrocute me until I let it go free. 
So without further adieu, here's the last video I'll ever be posting here. Next weekend, I'll be demonstrating how NOT to teach a class fire safety, but for now enjoy this video that was made by VAW-113 (The Black Eagles) aboard the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) to the tune of "Send Me On My Way" by Rusted Root. 
If for whatever reason the video won't play, you can always watch it direct on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deYOGf1gnqk&NR=1
WIDGETIZE
Jason Knight # 23. December 2008, 02:38
As you well know (though others may not) I have a simple scale I use to determine how big markup SHOULD be assuming semantic markup, that for the most part is fairly accurate. 1K + ( content size * 1.5 ) + 200 bytes per presentational image/flash embed. Sites that exceed that are usually badly coded - if it's more than double that the markup is rubbish.
Currently my blog page has 21,060 bytes of actual text content (ctrl-A, ctrl-C, open a text editor ctrl-v) - by my formula the upper limit for page size should be around 33 to 34k counting images - but if you view source and get a size on that, you get 44k. Given that the lions share of the content on the page is flat paragraphs with little or no formatting, I would revise that estimate down even further - If I was quoting that appearance to a client I'd be talking 27 to 28k.
... and the reason it's so bloated is readily apparant. Inlined javascripts of fixed functions? (createcookie/readcookie), divitus, classitus, inlined styling on html elements, paragraphs around elements that aren't paragraphs, presentational images in the markup, unneccessary scope declarations, redundant attributes (abbr and title at the same time?), double breaks for paragraphs, etc, etc, etc.
Seriously, if they don't know how silly <h2 class="title"> is, they need to, as I've said about a great many developers "Do the world a favor and back away from the keyboard and take up macrome weaving"
Other 'shortcomings' are readily apparant by way of all the rendering errors. The 'recent visitors' section has been broken in every browser for about two years now because the floats aren't size constrained - much less the lack of fallbacks to handle broken/missing avatars. I don't even know what the **** is going on with the 'friends' box now, and that's before we even TALK about the trian wreck that are the unusably small fixed metric fonts in a 'crappy little stripe' fixed width layout.
Though the REALLY sad part is this current incarnation from a code point of view is better than what they had the last iteration.
... so I'm not far behind you, though I'm writing my own system from scratch - A> because a unique codebase is less likely to get hacked than turdpress no matter how much you clean up the skin. B> I find the entire under the hood design of wordpress to be a complete train wreck obviously written by people who don't understand the 'fundementals' of programming. There's a reason it won this years pwnie for mass 0wnage. Much like phpBB the 'trust' isn't there because I take one look under the hood, and I feel like I'm looking at a '74 Zaporozhets. (No, that's not a compliment either)
Oh, add to that you can add pretty much any HTML tag to any 'response' with no filtering - talk about security hole... or that if you entity code, it de-entities it when you edit...