Abstract

This course is about what happens when things break. When something breaks, engineers are called upon to ask themselves, and answer: What caused it? Could it have been prevented? What do we do now? And of course, who's responsible?

For my part, having been trained as an engineer myself, I could never bring myself to blame engineers, or the profession as a whole, for whatever mistakes we may have made over the years, no matter what damage may have been caused in a failure.

I use this information to remind engineers, and especially students, of the consequences of carelessness, of avoiding checks and doublechecks, of not including safety factors, of not budgeting for maintenance, and other such precautions. We have these things to use as tools because, as smart as we are, we simply aren't smart enough to keep the things we make from breaking.

Just like the business about categories v. tags, share buttons in Wordpress blogs deserve a closer look. And first let me say this: there's a big difference between a blog hosted by wordpress.com (what I call the Com Blog) and one hosted elsewhere and powered by Wordpress (the Org Blog). It's the former I'm really interested in here, because it's free and thousands of people depend on it for that reason.

And, because it's free, you're really limited in things you can do to modify it. This is one area you have to watch when you make your blog.