Thanks to RapidWeaver for deleting my custom template again during an update I did not have time to post during June, sorry for that. In fact, I’m not sure which one is at fault here: MacOSX or RapidWeaver. During the initial creation of this blog, I made a custom template from an existing template called Interslice to add support for Google Adsense and to clean it up a bit to my personal taste.
The pain here is that RapidWeaver stores the templates inside its own application bundle, rather than in a separate folder. (For those not in the know, application bundles are just folders with a very specific structure, an “.app” extension and a custom icon).

Furthermore, when updating RapidWeaver, it downloads a new application bundle as a dmg file, automounts it and opens the folder, just like when you want to install a new program. Many apps update the existing bundle in the Applications folder instead and let the application automatically restart.
So when you update, you perform the same procedure as during normal installation. This would be fine if MacOSX didn’t completely replace the original application bundle, removing my templates in an unrecoverable fashion; The original bundle is not put in the trashcan, but is unconditionally erased from the harddisk!

This is an old design flaw in MacOS Finder that goes all the way back to MacOS1.0, but Apple has decided to keep this functionality of having the move operation being unrecoverable and atomic. This is the single-most stupid part of MacOSX!
If you are a pure mac user, not having used other platforms much, you will find the behavior quite logical. For the rest of us, it’s highly annoying and a dangerous operation to have in an operating system that normally shines on security and usability, because move means folder merging to us. It also makes it a complete nightmare to merge nested folders, something I do often, so I have to resort to the Terminal or muCommander to do that.

But still, even if a folder is replaced, why doesn’t MacOSX Finder just move the older folder to the trashcan instead of completely deleting it?

Wordpress

I was briefly looking at Wordpress to see if a web based blogging solution would fit me. Indeed Wordpress has a lot of momentum, a lot of plugins, themes and users. There are even applications like MarsEdit that plug in to Wordpress, so you can write posts offline and have them posted when you go online.

But after looking through about a hundred different themes I came to a simple conclusion: They suck. They are pretty to look at, but none of them are practical and the simple ones are too simple (i.e. no plugins allowed). So I went back to RapidWeaver.