Fun with Wordpress, and Creeds

A summary of my work this week comes courtesy of Bradley Halpern: "Wordpress is easy to break."

I know two guys on opposite sides of the East Coast who manually configured WordPress installs. I successfully confused both of them, which is usually bad news.

I'd go into detail about what wasn't working and what we tried, but honestly, if you just picture me beating WP with a stick while it laughs defiantly, you've got the idea.

Speaking of things that are broken, or allegedly broken, or in the view of Mike Fancher, not broken at all, I need to talk about the journalist's creed.

For reasons that sane people don't understand, I really like philosophy. It messes with your head, because in real life, something like ethics is really fluffy. It's the 21st century, we're big on moral relativity, and it's completely unintuitive to take something like that, and discuss it using extremely high standards of logic.

That's the creed: it's an Aristotle-esque declaration of the nature and characteristics of a journalist. I hadn't seen it in well over a year, and I'd never seen it in that light.

And why? Fancher was talking about the creed the way Walter Williams wrote it: the hard way. It's empowering, really.

The day after Fancher talked to us I read this article about how the press in Baltimore, which used to be a really good watchdog, doesn't have the resources to do it anymore.

If hyperlocalism and the like is what it takes to save journalism, we've missed the point.

Unfortunately, this semi-rant can't actually go anywhere, because that would require me to have something resembling an original thought on what can be done about it. I do agree with Fancher though, that the solution is in the ad money.

And I'm willing to bet it has something to do with the online ad money.