Cruftiness
Posted on March 2, 2006
Cruft, for the non-geeks out there is a semi-technical term used to descibe added features of dubious utility. The term is usually applied to software. For a long time many people in the computer industry looked at GUIs as cruft. A more modern example of cruft might be all those features of office suites (software) that you never use. I’ve never used a macro. I rarely use mail merge. In the modern, net-connected world, I think websites can be some website can be thought of as crufty. If it’s hard to navigate, that usually a good sign of cruftiness. On this site, I try to keep the cruft down with varying degrees of success.
Adding tons of plugins and themes doesn’t help, although you won’t see most of the plugins, and for the most part, the themes don’t affect the site’s navigation. Over the next few weeks, I will be doing things that will probably add to the cruft, although I hope the utility of these things will be apparent.
I plan on adding a gallery, and right now I am leaning towards ZENphoto. I am also pondering adding a wiki (though I don’t really know why). While I was planning on MediaWiki (of Wikipedia fame), I recently found out about a program called MicroWiki that is supposed to be able to serve as a wiki and an image gallery. The MicroWiki says it works as an image gallery, though a shitty one. He said the reason it’s a shitty gallery is because a) it’s still beta, and b) nobody comments on what does and doesn’t work, so he doesn’t know what people want fixed. The good thing about MicroWiki is that it can work alongside WordPress and share the same user tables, enabling one login (a big plus in my book). ZENphoto looks very nice, and apparently most of the people who use ZP also use WP, so there is a lot of talk about making ZP a WP plugin of some sort. At any rate, I will probably try out MicroWiki this weekend to see if it is up to the task of serving as a gallery. I hope it would also serve as a download module so I can use it with my Blender projects, but we’ll see.
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