Ruining a Relatively Good Thing

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From the Just-when-I-got-it-figured-out-they-went-and-changed-it Dept.

Technocrats are really good at it.

This new version of the Movable Type is a perfect example of how efficiency can override and mutilate efficacy. What once was a fairly straight forward way of editing and managing the various templates that run the MT blog model, has been chopped up into scores (if not hundreds) of sub-modules linked together by some obscure  background map that only a techie could relish navigating.

Where once I could edit the appearance and structure of my old blog with a couple of templates, I now have to navigate through a dozen templates to accomplish the same thing. From what I read, the reasoning behind these changes was to simplify the process. What a joke. What they've done is to create the same annoyance as those endless sub-menu choices that one gets on the phone when trying to get a simple answer like "What time do you close?" from a business. You know you're in for a ride as soon as you hear "Please listen closely as our menu has changed"...and you can bet your life that means the choices have multiplied -- along with the possibility of error.

While its true that 'one man's poisson is another man's poison' (gb shaw) and via la différence has always been a credo dear to me, it is possible to ruin a painting by not knowing when to stop.

What I have in general found to be the case with 'advancement for advancement's sake' is that the inherent ideal is to try to automate processes, which removes control of a process from its user. Anyone who has used MS Word knows how absolutely infuriating the auto-programming for spelling and grammar or bullets can be - and trying to discover how to turn them off even more so.

Similarly, MS Vista is a nightmare of annoyances that can consume hours of trying to undo embedded features that deny the user from accessing his or her own files on their own machine. Such "advancements", supposedly to increase security, make Vista equivalent to Millennium - or better - 8 tracks cassette players.

Maybe I'm being somewhat of a Luddite about MT4, but I doubt it. It smells like geek spirit.
You know something is amiss when there are hundreds of pages dedicated to the instruction set and a need for flash demos to do simple stuff.

The bastards killed ratboy!  

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This page contains a single entry by cul published on July 10, 2008 10:19 AM.

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