If you’re a member of our sister site Claire’s Cabal, you probably just got an automated email about your membership. You can ignore that. It was the result of me trying to change all the free memberships from “unpaid” to “paid.” Didn’t realize that would result in an email blast to everybody!
I also appear to have screwed up somehow, so that membership statuses may have changed. Don’t panic. And don’t think you’re suddenly a life member. 🙁 I did something wrong and have to figure out how to fix everything.
Also, I just put up five new articles — actually old articles that haven’t previously appeared online — on the Cabal Articles page.
Non-Cabalistas, feel free to ignore all this. 🙂
UPDATE: Okay, somehow I managed to really make a botch of the membership dates. They have all been fixed now, though I will doublecheck to make sure. Everything’s back to normal now, with membership dates as they originally were.
Reminds me of that old saying, “To err is human. To really screw up requires a computer.”
😉
A computer and a human to do something that triggers the screwup. 🙁
WordPress is supposed to be this magnificently user-friendly system. And it really does have marvelous capabilities of content management. So what I want to know is why does WP go nuclear every time I get within five feet of it?
Using it to blog? Fine. Using it to manage a store, or members, or forms, or anything else? Doooooooooooooom!
“Using it to blog? Fine. Using it to manage a store, or members, or forms, or anything else? Doooooooooooooom!”
That’s because you’ve learned how to blog, by making lots of mistakes, and fixing them. Did you expect to hop into the pilot seat of a 767 and instantly know how to take off and land? Of course not.
What I like about programming computers is that I can make more mistakes per unit time than in any other endeavor, and learn something from fixing each of them.
Very gentlemanly and wise of you, Bill. But I’ve worked with WP admin fuctions (albeit “litely”) for two years, since we established The Zelman Partisans. The truth is: I just suck at WP. I find it completely unintuitive. (I mean, srsly, who would think that to edit text in a sidebar you should have to click on Appearance –> Widgets, for instance? Does that make sense to anybody?) And generally, the fact that WP has so many really terrific useful functions like stores and membership simply means that any confusing attributes get spread over a wide array of functions, giving me more opportunity to mess up.
Now I’m in one of those states of mind with WP that I’m so sure I’m going to mess up that of course … I mess up.
Computer/software engineers, in general, are terrible at designing User Friendly product. I speak from experience as a former software engineer. Only one company, out of all the ones I worked for, had the smarts to run our designs/user interface through the office secretaries first to see how intuitive (or not) the product was for the end user. If the secretaries couldn’t figure out what to do, back it went for rework based on input from those secretaries. The user manuals were also put through a similar process. Logical, no? Yet almost all companies were more intent on getting product out the door than delivering product that made sense.
It is apparent that WP was written by geeks for geeks and not really for end users.
“The problem with computers is that they are designed to do what you tell them to, not what you want them to.”
WP adds in their interface, which is “user friendly” only as long as the user wants to do things the WP way.
True, Sam. I spent three years working for a company as a technical writer. My user manuals won awards, and so did our programs. Part of the latter is because I broke the beta programs more ways than the trained testers could imagine.
New management let me go because they had someone who could program, and “do the tech writing stuff” on the side. It didn’t trouble them that English was his third language, programming his second, and Hindi his first.