Options

I don’t like WordPress. This has been documented somewhere in this blog. I’m too lazy to link it.

Some other people don’t like WordPress either sometimes. I was just bitten by that same caching issue.

You see, I had made the mistake of thinking that enabling the WP-Cache plugin would actually enable caching on my system. I always thought “Man WordPress sucks! My blog is so slow! And nobody reads it anyway so it can’t be because people actually care about what I’m writing!”

But I digress. I enabled the WP-Cache plugin, and it was still slow. I looked a bit further, and the default options of an enabled WP-Cache plugin explicitly disables caching. You have to go into the plugin’s settings page and click “Enable”.

What the hell is that?! You know what that is? That’s a programmer right there. We love options. “Oh well if my toaster could turn inside out I could use it as a space heater in my bathroom.” Nobody wants to do that, but we love the fact that we could. We end up designing software for ourselves instead of our customers.

This is bad! Bad, I tell you! Bad! If i could hit you on the nose with a rolled up newspaper I would! Twice!

Users don’t want options, nerds want options. If you have a techy audience, then consider piling in options. R# has a million, and I think each and every one is delicious.

However, if your users are Johnny down on the warehouse floor, he doesn’t want to know about transactions, offline/online operation, or whether or not the circuit breaker is tripped or not. He wants to do work so he can get home and play with his kids.

And remember, DON’T LISTEN TO YOUR USERS. I love this quote:

Definitely don’t believe what people predict they may do in the future.