Sotfware’s a funny old thing
OK, so this is my first blog post here. Just intalled Wordpress, and getting to know it.
Wordpress, eh? Yes, it’s free, it’s supported by my hosting provider (Fast2Host, bless ‘em) and everyone knows how to navigate a Wordpress blog. After all, it’s used by millions of bloggers the world over, right? So it must be pretty bug-free and easy to use, right?And so it is, basically. Five minutes after clicking “install”, here I am, blogging away.
But you see that apostrophe up there in the blog title (and also in this posting title?). Funny thing, apostrophes (and double-quotes too, for that matter). You see, because they’re almost universally used by database systems to mark a piece of literal text (and distinguish it from a database command) , apostrophes themselves can be tricky to get into databases. They’re used in HTML, too, and various other places. And so to enter an apostrophe into a database, or show it in HTML, there are various work-arounds; special character sequences that tell the software “what comes next is an apostrophe, but don’t treat it like that, just handle it as plain text”. And most of the time, that works. Except that when setting up the blog, I entered a quote, and it came back displayed as \’. I edited it, thinking I’d mis-typed it. Still showing as \’ - and a second instance, I’d not seen first time around, was now \\’. Each time I edited, it added a backslash. As a developer, I quickly twigged that I needed to enter the “encoded” version, ' - now it displayed fine. I went back to admin to make one more little tweak, hit save, and voila! I was back to \’ again. When Wordpress displays ‘ on the public pages, it correctly displays it as a quote, or apostrophe. But it does the same thing when you edit, so that when you save, and then display again, the quote is “corrupted”.
Now this isn’t such a big deal. No planes have crashed, no power stations exploded, no pacemakers failed.But it’s an indication of just how fickle software can be. Sometimes my clients alert me to “issues” in software that, on the surface, appear really trivial, but also really obvious - how on earth could I have delivered software with such an obvious problem? But software testing is not a “do it once and forget” process; no doubt the developers of Wordpress tested that admin screen many many times, and never spotted what, to me, was a glaringly obvious issue. So this is no way a gripe with Wordpress. But it does make you wonder, if a piece of software as much used as Wordpress has glitches and gotchas of this type, is it any wonder that so many computer systems sometimes behave oddly, or that, now and again, even the most accomplished software developer slaps his forehead in a “doh!” moment when a client points out an “obvious” mistake?