Tearing My Scant Hair Out

I’ve been struggling with this for days now: trying to get WP to show a list of 20 recent comments — yes, since I think the dialogue is the most important part of this weblog — in the left-side menu. I’ve gone to the WP wiki, I’ve gone to the forums, and I’m finally flippin exasperated. Why would WP not include an easy option to display comments in their setup? Why am I teaching myself PHP, using the legacy my-hacks file, and getting errors when I try to do something as simple as get other peoples’ responses to show up as links in the sidebar? This is infuriating, and I’m so ready to go back to MT.

One of these days, I’m going to set up a writing course for coders and programmers who are solipsistic and arrogant enough to write their own documentation: it’s going to be called, “Audience, Audience, Audience, Audience, Audience, Audience: An Important, Common, and Much-Neglected Concern, and Yes, This Means You.” SixApart’s staff flunked a long time ago — that’s how they make their money, by taking your cash to do an installation for you after you get bogged down in their byzantine linguistic flow-charts — and, well, the WordPress folks are well on their way, mostly for structural reasons. Like making would-be users chase down non-workable information all over FAQs, support fora, and wikis.

After all, displaying a list of comments on a weblog is pretty esoteric. Who’d ever want to do that?