Pay no attention to that post that may have shown up in your feed readers…

While working on my theme a bit last night, I accidentally posted an unfinished draft post that I had been working on (and put on hold) about using svn:exnternals. Sorry for any confusion; I’ll finish that one up shortly.

To Block, or Not to Block?

I’m going with “block”.

Twitter recently went through a round of cleaning up spam accounts, and a lot of people have noticed their follower counts dropping because of it. That inspired me to take another list at the “people” following me, and weed out several more that Twitter hadn’t deemed as “spam”, although I think they may have understandably been trying to be conservative for fear of trashing a “real” account.

No harm, no foul?

In the beginning, I was of the opinion that it didn’t matter too much to me if these other people (or bots, etc.) wanted to follow me, because I still wouldn’t see stuff from them unless I followed them in return. That position is still pretty much true, in that their actions don’t ever really impact my day to day use.

The one issue that changed my mind and made me think that it might be a negative thing to “allow” these kinds of followers is that search engines may index those links, and give their Twitter account “link juice” by following it from my page. It’s not clear whether this happens or not, but I’d prefer to avoid being a part of it just in case.

So, how to decide?

I basically just went through and cleaned up (blocked) any followers who appeared “spammy”. I give a free pass to anyone I actually know, and in a few cases some local businesses that I’m OK with giving whatever benefit they may get from following me.

Other than those, I just try to decide whether it’s a “real” person with a genuine interest in following me, and if not, I axe them. Some of the indicators I use for “blocking” criteria are:

• Following tons of people without reciprocation (“following” count is way higher than “followers”)
• Primarily “marketing” related content (usually web / social network “experts”, etc.)
• Majority of their tweets are just links promoting their own web site / blog

There are probably others, but that covers a good deal of them. In rare cases, I’ll see a person I don’t know who seems “normal” enough, so I give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re honestly interested in following my posts, so I’ll usually leave them.

What Do You Think?

I’m curious to hear how other people go about making this decision, or whether you’re in the “who cares” camp and let anyone follow you.

Now that I’ve gotten my list paired down, I think I’m going to be more careful about weeding out every new follower, blocking them immediately if they seem suspicious according to my standards.

This topic started as a comment thread on Google Reader, on a post about a web application being built on top of WordPress as a “platform”.

I don’t want to call out the specific project or post in question, because the point of this post is to educate, not to slam or put down any particular person or application. It’s sufficient to say that the core of the application was unrelated to blogging or content management (which is what WordPress can be a good base for, BTW).

Ground work

Even if you haven’t heard of the Golden Hammer anti-pattern before, it’s very likely you’ve heard some variation of the quick summary of what it means: “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail“.

This is unfortunately a common pitfall in the software development world. It has many variations, but one of the most common comes in the form of a developer being overly familiar with a certain tool or system (often to the neglect or even exclusion of any others). Since the developer is so familiar with the particular thing in question, he begins to see all other future possibilities in the context of that thing he is most familiar with, and it will lead him to choose it for tasks where it may not be the most appropriate.

Like I said, this one is very common – common enough for it to earn its place as one of the most well known software development anti-patterns. This means that it is widely recognized and regarded as a bad practice by most people who know what they’re talking about in a particular field.

To WP or not to WP?

In light of that, only one question remains: is creating an application that is not primarily (or even peripherally) related to content management or blogging by building it on top of a blog/CMS product/platform a case of this anti-pattern, or not?

I would argue that it is.

Exhibit A: Wordpress Itself

If you’ve been around the core WP dev scene for long enough, you will have seen innumerable requests or proposals that this or that feature be added to the WP core. What is the usual, default answer, unless an excellent case can be made for why it fits? That’s right: “no”, or sometimes more politely, “do it in a plugin”.

There is a very good reason for that policy, and it’s basically a recognition of the principles that my argument here is based on. The idea is that anything that is added to the WP core increases the overall complexity of the system, and that is a very expensive proposition when you want maintainable code in the future. It increases the burden of maintenance as well as diluting the focus of the development effort.

Since maintainable code is essential for being able to quickly fix bugs, add new features, improve performance, and virtually every other change you will inevitably want/need to make to successful software, its importance cannot be overstated. For this reason, Matt and the other core devs will quickly turn down any feature proposal that is not essential to the core purpose of WordPress as a blog / CMS system, and they are very right to do so.

Do Likewise

You should take the same approach with your software. You should vigorously oppose the inclusion of peripheral code that is unrelated to the core function of your system. Basing your application on an entire codebase that is largely unrelated to your application’s core purpose is essentially the exact opposite of this approach.

“Platforms” vs. …

One of the biggest things (IMHO) that drives people towards building things on top of WordPress is that it’s talked about and considered to be a “platform”. There is certainly truth to this; WordPress can be a pretty good platform for building a CMS-style application on, since that’s what it’s meant to be.

Of course, the problem arises when people confuse “platform” to mean something you can build anything on / with. That usually isn’t the case, and it certainly isn’t for WordPress in the case of applications that are not primarily CMS or blog focused.

The issue is that the developers of WordPress regularly make important decisions regarding the structure of their code. They make these decisions with the driving goal of what will make it the best blog / CMS product / platform, and any other considerations are justifiably ranked extremely low or ideally discarded.

This is a huge issue if you’re trying to build an application (not a blog or CMS) on top of WordPress, because you will find yourself constrained by those decisions, when they often will not (because they should not) be made to facilitate you doing something unrelated with the codebase. You will find yourself working around parts of the system that are rightly designed for their intended purpose, when you are trying to use them for something else.

You will find yourself being required to update your code in response to updates / changes made in the base platform that are unrelated to your core functionality or to patch security issues that your product should never have had, but it has inherited them. You will have to look at every potential new feature or change you make through the filtered view of “what’s the best way to do this within WordPress” as opposed to “what’s the best way to do this”.

… “Frameworks”

Don’t get me wrong, constraints can be a good thing. They are great when they are at the appropriate level of abstraction. This is where frameworks come in. Things like Ruby on Rails (or the PHP clones like Cake) will impose opinions / constraints on how you write your applications as well, to varying degrees.

The difference is that frameworks like those are designed to have general purpose applications built on top of them. They will often handle the “plumbing” details like data access, etc. so that you can focus on writing the actual application code necessary for your application without being burdened by unrelated concerns. Platforms like WordPress, on the other hand, are existing applications that are built to be extensible within the scope of what they’re designed to be.

Can you, by looking hard enough through the WP goggles, find a way to map the unrelated features of your application to what WordPress provides, and only write new stuff or workarounds when you really, really can’t squeeze and make it fit? Sure, with the right hammer you can bang those square pegs into round holes all day long. The problem is that at the end of the day, the square pegs get pretty thrashed.

Wide Is The Road That Leads…

… well, you know where. The fact is that PHP is a very easy language to learn quickly, and modifying WordPress (via themes or plugins) has become a popular first step into web development. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there is a dangerous side to it.

Just because something is easy and/or quick does not make it the right technical decision. For an example web devs can relate to, dragging and dropping stuff onto web pages with MS FrontPage was a pretty easy thing to do for a lot of people who had no knowledge of HTML, CSS, web standards, etc. Why should they take the time to learn about all that stuff when they can be publishing their own web sites from the comfort of their WYSIWYG editor?

Of course, I think most web designers with any degree of experience would advise those FrontPagers that if they really wanted to make good pages / sites, they should take the time to learn more about the underlying technology and the other options available to them, knowing that along the way they will learn why FrontPage is evil.

In a similar vein, I would propose that people who are considering building their decidedly non-CMS app on top of WordPress take some time to expand their horizons. Maybe even build an app or two outside of WordPress, explore the other frameworks and lower-level components available for handling some of the stuff you’re depending on WP for (user management, etc.) and then come back and make a more educated decision on the best approach for your project.

I got an e-mail today from someone who noticed that my old Top Commenters plugin had been included as a target in some automated tool that searches for WordPress blogs that allow for links to be posted for the purpose of SEO manipulation.

There are a couple mitigating factors explaining why I don’t plan to do anything about it.

1. I don’t update / maintain this (or, currently, any other) plugin anymore.
2. It was only very early versions of the plugin that passed the commenter URL through to the “Top Commenters” list (this is the nature of the “exploit”). As of a version released in December 2006, it only uses the URL of registered users.
3. Even if it hadn’t been “fixed” years ago and I felt the need to issue an update to address the “problem” now, these people have obviously gone without updating this plugin for years, so it’s extremely unlikely that any of them would apply this one.

I’m interested in other thoughts as to what (if anything) I could / should do about this news.

UPDATE – I do not plan to link to the “tool” here, for obvious reasons, but I did see the page that displayed it, explained the “hole”, and even included a YouTube video showing how to find vulnerable blogs. At least they’re trying to be professional about it, I guess.

The look of this blog has been bugging me for a while, so I finally got around to doing something about it.

I think the main problem I perceived was that there was just way too much “stuff”, so I started from scratch and got rid of everything I deemed “expendable”, and tried to be pretty strict about it.

It’s still a work in progress, and I haven’t even looked at it in any browser other than Firefox yet, but I’m liking it a lot better already.