Imagine in this context how a modern CPU is held down when it needs data stored on a turtle slow HDD. Things are moving tough in the right direction, with SSD becoming more and more affordable. The ancient floppy disk was replaced by USB and external drives.

My recent deja-vu with old problems

I’ve switched from Picasa to Flickr so naturaly I’ve started getting the pictures from one place to another. As Picasa doesn’t have an open API I had to get my old DVD disks, copy them to my system and then upload them one folder at a time.

The ‘operation’ begun, everything went perfect with the first few DVDs, but I got to one that blocked the copy. I ejected the disk, cleaned it and did try again. No luck. I went to google for programs that try and recover bad files from scratched DVDs. I was optimistic as the disk wasn’t that scratched and I had worse disks that copy fine.

… After 3 days of using various programs for file copy/recovery I just gave up. What is lost is lost (I still got the small resolution files from Picasa), but I cannot stop and wonder why on earth none of my optical drives managed to copy from a CD that’s not too badly scratched.

Also why programs used for copying files still freeze if they find a file that’s unreadable. I’ve also used programs that skip through bad files but they were so bad that after 10 hours they’re read 7 files and skipped only 2.

There are problems I’ve had with optical media since I’ve started using CDs. None of them lasted 10 year (projected life of recordable disks) and I bet a stamped disk (mass-produced) won’t last 100 years.

The future?

Imagine you’re using 6-7 years from now the optical standard of that time, a disk that can store all your multimedia collections, all your work and programs in a multi terabytes space. What it you get a perpendicular scratch that affects all tracks (worst case, but highly possible). You loose everything. I’ve lost a few hundred megabytes of pictures thanks to a few surface scratches (disks were stored, not lended or exposed to dust/sun). What if it was something more important?

I don’t know about you but I don’t plan on using optical disks for storage in the future.

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And what’s beautiful about it is that everyone can enjoy it, even if they don’t own a hosting plan or a domain name, by creating a free account on WordPress.com, with a few limitations of course.

Wordpress Logo

So, let’s see what WordPress has managed to add in past years. It’s not a complete list so feel free to remind me the changes that matter most to you.

• The admin interface evolved a lot, making common tasks very easy: editing, writing, changing settings. The admin windows order can even be tweaked to your convenience
• post tags and tag cloud
• nested and paged comments
• theme widgets and multiple sidebars
• advanced post editor with functions for text editing and media manager (pictures, animations and audio)
• page and category templates
• theme editor directly from admin pages
• auto updater for the WordPress files
• manual updater for plugins and new plugin notifier
• impost and export for blog posts

Those are the most important changes WordPress undergone in the past years, but there are also a lot of small changes that make WordPress one of the most flexible blogging platforms on the web today.

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