so, i decided about a year ago that i would completely redesign this website…i tried to add a bunch of things that i thought were cool to the site, like the sliding dropdown menus, the iTunes songs in the sidebar, and the calendar at the top…i used wordpress as my blogging engine, it seemed to have a good community, had a lot of cool features, and had a nice plugin system to easily expand the feature set…after months of hard work, i finally launched the redesign in August of 2004…

i announced the redesign on the wordpress forums, which was probably my first and biggest mistake…don’t get me wrong, i think the wordpress community is great as a whole…with the explosion of blogging, and the tools like wordpress and moveable type that lowered the barrier of entry, there are a lot of new people on the internet who don’t really know a whole lot about web development…it is great to have a lot of new voices out there that might never get heard, but it brings with it a certain reliance on people who do know things about CSS, XHTML, Javascript, and a whole slew of other acronyms…

hang with me here, i’m about ready to make my point…the point is, although its great to have a bunch of new people with websites, some of them seem to think that everything should be given to them…they see something cool they like on a site, and immediately they want it on their site, but they don’t want to figure it out, or learn something and do it themselves…oh no, the owner of the site (and code) should bend over backwards and take time out of their life to reconfigure, debug, and simplify something they worked hard on, just so this demanding, whiny stranger can tell everyone how cool their blog is…there are reasons people have cool stuff on their site, BECAUSE THEY CAN DO IT!!!!!!!…they don’t need other people to hand them something, they take time to study and learn and read freely available resources, and make something cool of their own…

now, don’t get me wrong, i’m not one of those people who refuse to share anything they write…i made a plugin, WP iTunes, out of the cool idea i had for displaying my current songs on the sidebar…i have no problem with people taking a look at my CSS or Javascript and figuring out how i did stuff, and modifying it to work on their site…i’m not a fan of people copying things line for line, i think it is cool to take the code, figure out how it works, and make something of your own out of the new ideas and techniques you just picked up…i realize there are very few new ideas out there, most of them are just re-imagining or re-working an existing idea to make something new…i’m really, really, really tired of all the people who want me to take time (which i don’t have) and take things that i have worked hard on, and make it easy for them to add to their site…if you can’t figure it out, you probably shouldn’t be trying to use it…if i don’t respond to them immediately, they go bitch on some forum about how i don’t want to help them, or i want to keep my code as my “precious”…well, guess what?

I DON’T FUCKING HAVE TO HELP YOU, I DON”T KNOW YOU, YOU ARE NOT MY FRIEND, I DIDN’T START BLOGGING TO MAKE FRIENDS!!!!!

if people are polite, and truly want to learn instead of just taking, i have absolutely no problem helping them, because that is how knowledge gets spread…but if people want to be whiny, immature little bitches, then that is how i am going to treat them…or maybe i’m just being a dick, either way i don’t care…this is just a reason i hate having a website