WP (thoughts)

Recently I updated my WordPress installation, which I wrote about at the time. If you’re not interested in WP, I’d suggest looking away now, and I’ll write some more rubbish later on. Promise. Otherwise, read on…

While I still think WP’s upgrade instructions should be better than they are, I acknowledge that I’m one of these people who does fiddle around “under the hood” and so I shouldn’t expect the update process to figure these things out for itself. That’s fine – the instructions suck, but for general use I guess they’re just about OK.

What does annoy me though is when you get needless use of bandwidth that also comes from the WP installation. I’m talking about the dashboard screen. It bugs the hell out of me, because it pulls in a lot of data from external sources.

Now, when you’re on Blogger or similar, that’s fine. The only bandwidth you’re using up is Blogger’s. Then it FTPs the updated post/page back to your own site. Groovy. But WP is entirely based on (in my case) d4d™’s webspace. I get 3Gb of transfer per month as part of my hosting, but have to pay when it goes over that. 3Gb for d4d™ is normally fine. (with the exception of when Google images fucks up, but that’s been dealt with now)

But the dashboard page pulls down a whole load of things from the development blog of WP, and a couple of other places. That’s all coming out of my bandwidth, and I haven’t said I want it to happen. It’s just there. And to me, that’s not on.

So yet again, I’ve been fiddling under the hood, and removed a whole bundle of code from the dashboard index page, so now I’m not seeing any of the news feeds. If I want to, I’ll reactivate the code. But I doubt I’ll want to, to be honest.