Cookies from strangers

I have my browser set to prompt me to accept or reject cookies for every new site that I visit. Most times I reject all cookies for a site, unless I actually need them to view the content and really want to access that content, e.g. online banking, e-mail, membership sites.

Most sites don’t really require cookies for the site to actually function, they just use them for tracking purposes or for managing logged in sessions. Most still allow you to view the information on the site, even with cookies disabled. Some, though, try to force unnecessary cookies on you in order to view any of the content on the site. That annoys me.

Last night I was trying to browse some interesting-looking blogs that were featured on the WordPress.com home page and discovered that domain-mapped WordPress blogs (i.e. blogs that are hosted at WordPress.com but use their own domain names) are completely unviewable if you are logged into your WordPress.com account but don’t accept cookies for the domain you’re trying to visit. What it is apparently trying to do is load the blue WordPress.com account panel at the top of the page but can’t if the cookie is rejected. So what it ends up doing instead is getting caught in a loop, trying to load and reload remote-login.php?login=sessioncode on the domain.

According to the WordPress support forums, WordPress is aware of the problem but has no plans to fix it. So, in the end, if you encounter that problem yourself and really want to view the site in question, you’ll have to accept cookies for that site. Me, I haven’t yet hit a domain-mapped WordPress blog whose content I want to see badly enough to overwhelm my intense annoyance about the cookie requirements. Your mileage may vary.

I hate it when they do that

I hate it when WordPress just changes things suddenly*. You log in with your dashboard looking one way and then save a post to have the look and layout of the dashboard change completely.

And it always feels like a step backwards. Oh, I’m sure that eventually I’ll get used to things and it won’t be so annoying, but right now I’m cranky about it. It doesn’t resize well — I frequently don’t have my browser open at maximum width and so now the updated, “floating” right-hand sidebar now overlaps my posting area.

Not happy about that. The new WordPress dashboard design appears to be expecting a minimum window width of just shy of 1000 pixels — I could understand 800, like many WordPress themes, but why 1000? One of the main reasons for locking widths is usually to accomodate header graphics and the like — there are none in the WordPress dashboard so I fail to see why they couldn’t make all of the columns resizeable.

Hrmph!

* (Yes, I know it wasn’t sudden, but I suspect that most people don’t read WordPress.com blog posts.)

Header image goes AWOL

The header image for this blog suddenly disappeared a short while ago. Of course, I can’t find where on earth I have a copy of the image on my local hard drive so I’ve spent the last 1/2 hour or so trying to find it. Finally I decided to check to see if anyone had reported problems.

Sure enough, there is a problem with broken images. According to that post thread:

Amazon’s S3 Service is down which is causing some image serving problems on WordPress.com.

According to the Amazon Web Services health page, they’re still trying to fix problems with Amazon Simple Storage Service (EU) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (US). Their latest status is “We are continuing to pursue corrective action”. I’m guessing it’s going to be awhile.

So, if you don’t see a header image, you know why.