After receiving several reports that the SiteMeter bug had been fixed — or, rather, that SiteMeter had accommodated itself to a bug in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — I’ve restored it.
I love Charles Johnson’s explanation at Little Green Footballs. Politics apparently dictates technology, as he espouses a survivalist view of Web publishing.
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I think your last comment is a little off the mark here. I like your “survivalist” metaphor, but in programming it really isn’t connected to conservative politics. It may be more connected to paranoia, and in software development a little paranoia is a good thing.It’s a fairly common attitude, especially among “older” (read pre-web) program designers. We had a similar attitude on a product I helped develop because the lead programmer’s attitude was “I don’t want anyone to have our balls in their vise”.Johnson has written all the code LGF runs on, it pre-dates most of the commonly used blogging hosts, and it’s a pretty impressive piece of work. So not only is LGF immune from 3rd-party bugs, it gives LGF a distinctive look.But I don’t see anyone else using it to base blogs on. It seems that not only does Johnson not use other people’s stuff, no one else uses his. I don’t know why that is – I really like the way LGF looks, but maybe Johnson didn’t figure a way to package it like Typepad or WordPress or Blogger.Ultimately it might be a failure of vision. Wait, did I say politics didn’t enter into it? I think I might have argued myself into agreeing. 🙂
Steve: Agreed that it’s impressive, but look at all he’s cut himself off from. He’s got the beef jerky in the cellar and plenty of ammo. And he’s off the grid, by cracky!
I’ve wasted an otherwise uncommitted summer weekend dealing with 3rd-party “inconsistencies” in a release we’re preparing. And it’s driving me crazy (though some would say it’s just a short putt). So right now I’d gladly chuck all the 3rd-party code in the world for a little peace and quiet!In my day, we didn’t cooperate with other programmers! We defended against them! We wrote our own products, and we wrote the libraries the products used, and we wrote the compilers and the gosh-darn OS too!And we LIKED it!