BrentRoos.com

I hate it when this happens. WordPress.com has added some sort of stats script that has rendered the markup of my blog as invalid.

It seem like they do this stuff on Friday so they don’t have to listen to people bitch when they close support until Monday. It never ceases to amaze me. But alas, this is a free service (for some, not me because I have custom features that Blogger provides free of charge). Both wordpress.com and Blogger seem to output invalid markup when inserting photos into a post. You’d think that things would improve over time in that arena, but it seems to have gotten worse over time on both platforms.

Here is the string that seems to be causing the problem:
ex_go({’crypt’:'D6|,Y1mqNx-yA+1i3rQelciT]DG]j7VlB-/O%sa2%P&Wvchd4Y4%8~sP,ah.wA.LT&62urF+mUJpMsVIWKEhl86qt-GD8wdc5q%b3RfIC2y/?V+W[RsU|TYmw.pQjfjWEE+0IV/YBviB-2J/_x’});
What is this? WordPress.com, can you please remove it or use something else that does not cause my markup to fail validation please? It seems to be a stats script of some sort. IT SUCKS!

I will say that my main reason for staying on wordpress.com, rather than switching back to Blogger is that wordpress.com usually validates to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. But now it doesn’t anymore. Why sacrifice all of the other other features available on Blogger then? I’ve gone through this 1001 times and I’m torn between the two at this point. It seems as if I will never be satisfied here, because although many of the features are great, the ones I truly want are unavailable for “security reasons.”

What to do…I just want simplicty, and yet be able to use my blog as best as possible? I want validitiy if I am going to stay on wordpress.com, that is the bottom-line. I hope this gets resolved, then all is good. If not, I will be permanantly moving to Blogger.

I was happy for about one month, and now I’m angry again.

By the way, before anyone says a word about hosted WordPress, I will tell you off the bat, I’m not interested in paying any money for my blog in the future. Blogger is free in every way, and has improved dramatically, including adding hAtom support. Besides, Google rocks just as much as Microsoft now, so why not take advantage of everything at my fingertips?

EDIT: Screw it! I’m no longer concerned with validation so much, as long as it isn’t going to be something that will make my blog look differently across browsers. It isn’t as if Blogger even comes close to being valid markup.

If simply adding a .jpg image or embedding a flash video (YouTube for example) is going to render my site’s markup invalid, then I am no longer interested in compliance with those standards anyway. Am I supposed to refrain from adding multimedia to my blog? It’s 2008, of course I’m going to add mutimedia.

Here’s something to ponder: Does it really even matter anymore? Most of the top sites I visit do not validate when I check. There you have it…