Wedge

-sigh- Except that honestly, THIS IS LESS WORK.

You quote the whole message, find the bit you want to reply to, press enter and START REPLYING. No mess, no hassle, no ambiguity and less chance of things being taken out of context.

The only reason you keep pushing your methodology is because you haven't tried this one.

You have to drag+select, click to insert a quote, enter to start a new line then start replying. This... you press ONE BUTTON FOR THE ENTIRE MESSAGE, none of this drag+select+insert for every single paragraph of a big message, which is what it was designed for.

This sort of thinking: that feature x is better than feature y because feature x is what you're used to and expect to have without considering what feature y can do is the main reason I hate developing for other people. I don't like it that people point to another system and say "I want that" without understanding if it even is the best solution to their problem, when invariably it's a solution to someone ELSE's problem, adapted to your use, without being the actual solution to YOUR problem.

You see, what Nao has created is a solution to HIS and MY problem, having a big ol' message and wanting to reply to it paragraph by paragraph. So you press quote once, find the bit you want to reply to, then JUST REPLY. No hassle. It wasn't built for you, but then again neither was the method you keep pointing out as your holy grail. Fortunately for my sanity, our holy grail is not your holy grail, and that we build it how we see fit, not because other people tell us how we should build it. It just so happens that what we build happens to be mostly in sync with what other people want.

We have no qualms about leading and dictating how it's going to go forward. We take into account what people want but ultimately we are building something that we will use ourselves on our production sites, and that is first and foremost to us.

The pretty URLs stuff? Nao wanted that for Noisen. The blogging stuff? Nao wanted it for Noisen, I want it for InI. The quote splitter? Nao wants that for here, amongst other things. (This is how it works: we build it with our own needs in mind, and maybe going a step further, but ultimately to what we want it to do, and not what people keep trying to tell us we should do because somehow someone else's solution to a problem is better... it usually isn't. If it was, we'd have adopted it long ago. We didn't... I wonder why that is.)

I should add, in my previous career, I made a lot of money for myself and my company because I was able to find solutions that solved the problems at hand, rather than solving the symptoms.

Most of the time, the solutions people propose solve the symptoms of a problem, not the actual problem.

Classic example: hide post. The idea is to encourage community contribution, except all it does is encourage people to post one line answers. So you hide content until someone replies, they reply in order to see the content. Yes, you solve the problem of a lack of participation, but now you have a new problem of crap participation. This might solve your problem if you have a very narrow definition but in reality you've traded one thing for another.

Honestly... your solution does that. You trade pressing Ctrl-C then Ctrl-V for pressing a single button with the mouse, hardly an earth shattering change. You're not changing the fact that you're still doing most of the work, rather than letting the computer do some of it for you, and in reality you're not saving a lot of time, because in the time you've moved to press the relevant button, you could just as easily have already pressed Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, like I normally do with such things. Thus you're altering the symptoms, not solving a problem, and at worst you're pretending that you're making your life better, when you're still doing all the work.

And some people say I have no imagination... honestly, it is this ability to get to the heart of an actual problem that led to me being able to stare down the face of a senior vice president of a former multi-national company, and tell him that he would get his solution implemented, and I quote, "over my dead body". Because, as I later explained and went on to graphically demonstrate, his solution traded one problem for another three, very expensive, very complex to implement and support problems, and even then it didn't really solve the problem in the first place, that of system integration.

And no, that argument was not the reason I left; I left a few months (and many grey hairs) later once the company started to implode, because their disjointed, broken thinking was rife throughout the entire company, and I left 3 months before they collapsed.

That would tend to discourage use of the existing gallery items, actually? I'm not sure that's a bad thing though...

Well, for a blog+replies, or a page+comments, I guess it might make sense, but that still makes the assumption you're not going to make anything else in that structure.

SD is SimpleDesk, see simpledesk.net - it's a helpdesk system I worked on a lot last year and have been working on the last few weeks - once the new version is done, I'll be backseat again.

The thing is, the reason why WP is so open to plugins is a little because of its system but mostly because it's actually very simple: there's almost nothing to it. You have this notion of "The Loop" being this massive system that underpins it, and structurally, that's insane.

My blog is my way of getting the analysis and design parts out of my system so I can get implementation done.

To a point I almost need to go and just build it rather than floating around and around trying to figure out the best way to do everything, aka holy grail syndrome.

Oh, Chrome's version numbering is ridiculous.

I should note that I nearly called the next version of SD 1.1 even though it's about 10k lines bigger than 1.0... and 1.0 is barely 10k lines itself!