Who Uses Textpattern?
Via Peter : 29 Oct 07 : community, funny, survey, textpattern, txp
Come together and be real cool :-) If you can bare all and reveal some of your true nature, you and TXP will be so much better for it! This is a qualitative survey meaning it looks at the quality of TXP users' lives - the rich details, what motivates us, what we feel etc - rather than a quantitative survey which looks at how many of this, that and the other. A great quantitative survey has been conducted at A List Apart and it is likely that TXP users have a similar demographic profile.
But wouldn't you also like to know where users at in their heads and hearts, what draws us to Textpattern whether closely or distantly, unusual things we never imagined etc? After all we are not numbers, we do not fit in boxes and we are more than strange user names on a forum. This survey is an attempt to document all in one place the mysterious "who" that we really are, what really makes us tick and if TXP users are the coolest beings on the planet.
How to Complete the Survey
You can remain anonymous so relax, enjoy and tell it as it is! Tell us about yourself in your own words! If you can open up you can make this survey a real good read for the TXP community. Here are some questions to get you started but you don't have to answer them. They are just off the top of my head. Your agenda and priorities will be far more interesting.
Example Questions
Why do you use TXP, where were you born, where do you live, do you have any hobbits, how long have you been using TXP, why do you like TXP, how well do you know html css php abc or bbc, are you an internet junkie, what's the difference between a singularity, what is life all about, who do you love, do you love, are you angry about anything, are you successful, what is success, are you happy, do you have a dream, do you sleep well, do you live on chocolate, do you play sport, can you put your feet behind your head, do you think of sex every six seconds, is sex overrated, what annoys you, what makes you cry, what makes you happiest, is reincarnation making a comeback, are you real or a bunch of pixels I have given meaning to, do you have a favourite country, food, drink, drug, scent, place, tree, song, bird, view, season, painting, book, film, piece of trivia, joke, story, memory or txp tag?
Readers said...
2 · Stef
07 Jan 08Only 1 comment so far? And by the author? Criminal! Time to rectify that. Engage…
I’m also a jack-of-all-trades, master of very few, and prefer it that way. Some might say I don’t exist except in digital form. Some are right.
Being an early adopter of the Internet (Netscape (RIP) on a Sun Sparc workstation at uni using what was then called JANET) I could see where it was going but was — and to some degree still am — hopeless at putting together a stylish web site.
Of course, I found TXP in late 2005 and have never looked back. It’s the whole deal that amazes me. Simplicity, flexibility, elegance, but without sacrificing power if you want to rev the engine a bit and get your hands oily. And I applaud the direction the dev team are taking it; amid all our random misguided ideas and notions they don’t falter in their belief.
And to top it off, the community is amazing. I spent a month or so lurking before I took the plunge and the TXP forum was by far the best place to hang out. Very little elitism that you find in “other” similar products; virtually everyone is willing to help out, even if it’s a polite but firm RTFM and a link.
I only code because I can. Sort of. 100% self-taught — which explains a lot — I was brought up on a diet of Commodore Vic20 BASIC, Spectrum BASIC (eeek, showing me age now… “R” Tape Loading Error), typing in programs from the back of magazines in Hex, migrating to assembly language on the Amiga (wow, what a machine) then unfortunately moving to the awful PC architecture. From there I did C and Java for a laugh — ignoring C++ because it really is ugly — before realising that scripting was the way forward because it’s the “glue” that binds the rest together.
After a brief sojourn into AWK and shell scripting combined with HTML and JavaScript, I found CSS and eventually combined the latter three languages with PHP and MySQL. And TXP.
I still dabble in AWK to keep the amateurs out. Would love to know Perl and Python but they scare me. Would love to understand Ruby but it’s like Klingon to me. Would love to know why 42 is such a great number. Sadly, one man only has capacity for so much.
When not coding I run my own record label for free and also pay the bills with a “proper job”. But music is my life; been in a few bands, had some success, still making music every week as well as attempting to launch fresh artists and mixing/producing their records. Won’t rest until the last major record label has been smashed to fragments so independent music has a chance to be heard. I never stop searching for new sounds.
I’m also keen on movies, photography, lomography and Photoshop image manipulation, and am just finding my feet in all that. Have written a book that was read by precisely three other people, am working on several other manuscripts that may or may not get finished, and collaborating on writing a screenplay. I ponder about too much, always look for cause rather than effect and think the world would be a better place without TV and newspapers.
You're a cool bloke, Stef, and I really liked your story. You're a man after my own heart in many ways but I hope you're a much better musician than me though. I was going to interview you soon...now I'll have to think of a new bunch of questions :-) (Peter)On the whole the world is amazing: Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Oz, NZ, Fiji, Italy, France, Sweden, Germany, Latvia, Estonia, Spain… blah blah. I love experiencing culture off the beaten track and avoid tourist hotels if at all possible. Much prefer turning up at a place with no plan, no accommodation, no GPS and only a flight to catch at the end of it, then getting on a bus with the locals and finding my way around.
I love everything as long as it doesn’t tell me what I can and can’t do. Hence all governments suck, religion stifles humanity and I despise Windoze. In fact, 99.58% of software is rubbish and I’m therefore, like an artist, caught between the obvious dichotomy between what I do and what I appreciate. TXP is in the remaining .42% of course.
There’s that number again.
1 · Peter (TXPQ)
27 Oct 07I am a “jack-of-all-trades, master of none”, having had about 40 jobs of all descriptions. But I’ve been unemployed since 2000. I hitch-hiked through Europe and Asia to Australia in 1968, experienced Northern Afghanistan when it was paradise, was overwhelmed by the generosity and love of Indians, Chinese and Malays in Malaysia, found the shock of India very hard to stomach (enteric fever), dug holes in 100 degrees plus in the Aussie outback but left two weeks before the small company I worked for found nickel and became fabulously rich. The geologist had advised me to stay but I was headstrong and have lost many opportunities and upset many people because of it.
I’ve used the internet since 1994 but made no friends which must be another flaw in my character because I have no friends in real life either. Possibly a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur, I thought I had managed to escape detection but perhaps everyone else can see it but I can’t. I’ve been doing web design for 4 or 5 years and using Textpattern for 3 or 4. Although I’m fine with HTML and CSS I can’t get my head around PHP or any kind of programming. I don’t seem to be any good at design either and am always disappointed by the reaction or lack of reaction to my web sites.
But one thing I feel certain I am not deluded about is everything I have written at 1breath.com – and that’s after about 40 years when I first found out about it. I should be in a state of constant bliss by now but my concentration and devotion is hopeless so I am just a generally happy guy except for occasional highs and lows. I can’t understand why the site is not incredibly popular as everyone’s problems would be solved if they tried it out and they would all find what their heart is yearning for. And they don’t even have to change their lifestyle, religion, politics or anything! Mmmm, sounds delusional, doesn’t it? Oh well, perhaps you think this TXP user is living in cloud cuckoo land. Well I am sometimes! But I say if the penny drops about what’s said on 1breath.com you’ll enjoy the rest of your life. But whatever you think about me, TXP is still an elegant, stable, lightweight CMS that satisfies my amateur needs to make blogging and article navigation easy. Long live TXP!